Class Consciousness 10 Things New Teachers Should Know (and Veteran Teachers Should Remember)

“And, when I am forgotten, as I shall be, And sleep in dull cold marble, where no mention Of me more must be heard of, say, I taught thee”

William Shakespeare Henry VIII (1613) ​

Preface: CAN EAT MORE

I’m a damn good teacher. I’ve been doing it for almost 20 years, and I’m incredibly proud of my accomplishments in the classroom. But the idea that I have some authority to tell other people how to teach still feels odd to me. I’ve helped two student teachers through their apprenticeships, and they assure me that I have not completely ruined their minds or spirits. Still, for reasons that I will discuss below, many teachers (including myself) bristle at the idea of yet another book on How to Teach.

Not that this deters the oodles of scholars who insist on pumping out such texts every year. Most of them are focused on brain-numbing minutiae or seizing on the research phenomenon of the month. I’ve read many books about How to Teach, most of them containing about 3% worthwhile information and 97% filler material best described as “Stuff we covered in

1 grad school” or “Rhetorical nonsense required to justify the existence of a text that could have easily been a pamphlet”.

This book is about the deeper stuff — not so deep as Freire or Dewey, but in that ballpark. At the same time, it mixes the philosophical stuff with plenty of nuts-and-bolts advice for classroom survival. I’ve tried to boil down the most important things I’ve learned in the last two decades into a few key points. I hope they’ll be useful for young folks starting into education, as well as more experienced teachers with open minds.

While obviously this book is directed specifically at teachers and administrators, everyone reading it has — presumably — spent time in school as a student. Therefore it should ring bells for everyone. Moreover, as citizens charged with the responsibility of improving our systems of education, we all have a duty to learn more about how classrooms work — and why they often don’t.

I’ve mixed in some memoirish elements as necessary, but I’ve tried to keep them minimal and relevant. (Strunk and White insist that we “Omit needless words.” Rest assured that

I have completely omitted all needless words from the pages you now hold in your hands.)

Nothing bores me more than people (especially teachers) who talk to kill time or hear their own voices. Therefore I will be direct and succinct.

And there’s another reason I summoned the chutzpah to write this book. In his last novel, ​ ​ Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut writes: ​ Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”

2 I know for a fact that many teachers (and other folks) feel as I do, and I want to reach them. But I also want to reach those who feel differently. One of the most important things we can do as intelligent humans — especially as educators — is engage in dialectic conversations with open minds and a willingness to find common ground. Without trying to be immodest, I can say that

I’ve got a good track record of establishing dialogue and helping people see the world in different ways.

In Futurama episode 3ACV15 (“I Dated a Robot”), Fry falls in love with a robot that is ​ ​ programmed to show enthusiasm for everything he says. Thus, when he describes the physiology of his digestive system — “Then, when I feel so stuffed I can’t eat more, I just use the restroom.

And then I can eat more!” — she responds with awe: “You should write a book, Fry. People ​ ​ ​ ​ need to know about the CAN EAT MORE.”

This is how I always feel when writing or talking about my life and experiences. It’s hard to know which bits are totally obvious, which are fascinating only to me, and which might be interesting (and/or useful) to other people. My rambunctious ego usually makes this an academic dilemma, but it seems fair to confess it at the outset.

My voice in the pages ahead flips endlessly between first and second person. I will instruct the reader to heed advice and obey commandments, but mostly I will speak about my own experiences and explain what works for me. As the saying goes: Your mileage may vary.

Avoiding repetition is a prime directive of this book. I hate hearing the same stories over and over, and I’m terrified of inflicting such pain on other people. (This is a special danger in marriage, as in Chris Rock’s bit about the married person yelling: “Yeah, you told me about that

3 [bad word] time! Why don’t you go and get kidnapped? Have something new happen to you!”)

My poor students are constantly subjected to jokes and stories they’ve heard before. Sometimes this happens over and over; in 2013 two unlucky souls were sentenced to a third consecutive ​ ​ ​ semester with me. I’ve only got 18 weeks’ worth of funny/interesting things to say, and this material gets old quickly. I’ve tried to keep this book fresh.

I’m not like other teachers — let’s just get that out of the way. I love literature and grammar, but I also love video games and hip-hop music and zen buddhism and writing fiction and radical politics. As a result I often feel isolated in any given social situation. It’s rare enough to find another person who shares one of my passions, let alone two or three. The hip-hop heads ​ ​ get bored when I talk about literature, and the other teachers smile derisively when I rave about the latest Elder Scrolls video game. The people at the zendo shrug their shoulders when I talk ​ ​ about Emma Goldman’s anarchism. And so on.

This even bleeds into my word choice. Hip-hoppers don’t trust people who say things like “The Schultz-inspired Charle Brwn EP from Dem Atlas is layered with deep thematic ​ ​ exploration and metaphor, aligning the author’s life with classic comic and cartoon tropes from the late 20th century.” On the other hand, the teachers I teach with scowl with disapproval if someone says something like “That new Arundhati Roy book is ill.” I don’t use hip-hop vernacular in an artificial way; I’ve been living that life for decades. We talk like the people we talk to. When I chat with my mates in the UK, I use their vocabulary, like saying “mates” instead of “friends”. It’s like the Langston Hughes poem “Motto”.

4 To make matters worse, the students roll their eyes with suspicious hostility whenever a teacher uses slanguage, even if it’s authentic for the teacher using it. So while I might say “This semester’s gonna be wicked, yo” to my friends, once I get into the classroom, I turn into Ned

Flanders: “This is going to be an excellent semester.” Only after a month has passed can I drop in the occasional “f’real”.

My goal here is to spit wisdom at every teacher willing to hear me out, especially the littluns entering the classroom for the first or second year. I’ll be rolling various interests into this conversation — hip hop, video games, The Simpsons, zen Buddhism, and others — but of ​ ​ course I will keep the overall discussion broad in scope and accessible to everyone.

Much of the following discussion is centered on secondary education, but I hope there are enough universal elements to make it relevant to elementary and tertiary educators as well. I will mostly discuss my life as a classroom teacher, but many parts will also apply to paraprofessionals, classroom aides, and even some administrators.

One final introductory note is aimed at young people. (I don’t know why a teenager would read a book about teaching, but if my years in the classroom have taught me anything, it’s that you never know who’s paying attention.) To anyone who feels — as I often did, in my teenage years — awkward, small, despised, and/or inadequate: It gets better. I was overjoyed to see that phrase take shape as the motto of the movement to support LGBTQ youth, because it’s true about other aspects of social relations, too.

5 I got bullied, harassed, abused, and ridiculed regularly during middle school. Some tough kids stole my chain, and I got wedgies that inflicted real horror. But I quickly realized that the worst thing I could do was act like the jerks who tormented me.

These things didn’t kill me, and they definitely made me stronger. I came to own my status as an outcast, and then I realized I had taken it too far and was alienating decent people who meant me no harm. I figured out which elements were keeping me separated from the people who weren’t jerks, and I got rid of them. This is a vital step. Too many people simply turn up the volume and then wonder why nobody wants to hang out with them.

Write. Draw. Paint. Play music. Do something creative to help you endure. Don’t keep it locked in, because it will explode when you’re not ready. You might even hurt yourself or someone else. Find people like you, and work hard to be a better person — not the type of person the jerks want you to be, but someone who is stable, happy, productive, and committed to doing good in the world. Remember that the hardest part about dealing with nasty people is not letting them turn you into one of them. And remember that the best way to do something nice for yourself is to do something nice for someone else.

Okay, enough with the appetizers. As I say to my students at the beginning of every class period: Let’s get started! ​

6 1. You teach for a reason.

“Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Howard Thurman Quoted in Gil Bailie’s Violence Unveiled (1996) ​ ​

In my junior year of high school I had a remarkable English teacher named Ms. Smith.

She, more than anyone else in the world, inspired me to be a teacher, because she was so horrible that I said to myself: “There should be more good teachers in the world.” Then I realized I had to ​ ​ become one of those good teachers. ​ Ms. Smith (not her real name), if you’re reading this somehow: I’m sorry, but I have to be honest. Your class was the epitome of surface over substance. One day you wrote “Carpe diem” on the board and asked us if we knew what it meant. You probably didn’t realize how many times we’d slogged through the same supposedly-inspiring lesson from other adults. Then, presumably enthused by a viewing of Dead Poets Society, you ordered us to stand on our desks. I ​ ​ expect you meant this as a freewheeling exercise in unconventional thinking. But in that movie, the desk-standing gesture is a spontaneous display of student recognition and respect. Using force made it just another meaningless school activity. (Like the note cards I didn’t make for your research paper. As a result — despite what you said was a good piece of writing — I got a

D.)

Driven by a desire to be everything Ms. Smith was not, I am proud to say that today I am a very good teacher. Students look forward to my class. Not all of them, obviously; as with every teacher, my style doesn’t match every student’s preference. But I work hard to be excellent, and

7 it shows. I’m lively, entertaining, and (most importantly) relevant. My class matters, and I explain in clear, plain language why.

The most important advice I have about how to teach is this: Figure out why your class is important. This is going to be different for every subject, and for every individual teacher. But you’ve got to let your passion — whatever it is, and however it manifests in your life — set the agenda for your classroom. The kids are not going to care just because you care, and perhaps the most important job of a good teacher is to show them why they ought to care. That won’t happen with lectures or mere facts. It will happen when they get infected with the joy and enthusiasm you have. And if you have none, perhaps you should find some other line of work.

Think about how you share your passions with friends and family members. You don’t share with rigid authority or assumptions of compulsory buy-in, right? So don’t use those tools in your classroom. I’ve always been unsatisfied with adults who use “because I said so” with young people. Sad to say, many adults (and therefore many teachers) assume youths must automatically and always take a subordinate position. This drove me crazy when I was a student, and it drives me crazy as a teacher. It goes without saying that students should respect teachers and other adults, since honoring one’s elders is a simple rule of good behavior. But adults should respect other people, too, even younger people. I’ve always demanded logic and reason — or at least some compelling metacognitive ethic — and, like many kids, I found this lacking in the classrooms of my youth. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was an early indicator of my anarchist convictions.

Of course I’m not a parent, and I know you can only reason so much with a three-year-old. But as a teacher I run my classroom using reasoned processes and authority that

8 proves its legitimacy at all times. It pays off — I haven’t written a referral in years, and I don’t engage in petty power struggles.

Part of this is because I’m working with students between the ages of 15 and 18. I knew early on that I wanted to be there for the critical moments when teenagers really start to confront the world, when they begin figuring out their place in the torrential river of history. I taught 8th grade for a year, but I had a hard time relating to younger students. They didn’t even understand simple commands like “Hey! Hey! HEY! HEY!” (Being a substitute kindergarten music teacher ​ ​ for a day was infinitely worse.) The juniors and seniors in my classes are mostly adults, and they generally live up to the high expectations I set.

But the other major reason for my success as a teacher comes from the dignity and respect I offer to each person who comes through the door. As much as possible, I treat all students like adults, and I demand that they take responsibility for what they say, do, and — crucially — do not do. Like the best teachers I had as a student, I strive to be a mere stepping stone between the past and future, between students and their best selves. As I tell the kids, it’s a game between them and the universe; they just have to figure out how to get past me.

I chose to teach English because the teachers who inspired me most taught English. (The two exceptions were my mother and my high school French teacher.) They taught me the most about the world and my place in it, by showing me the power of language. They taught me to harness words to suit my needs — and the needs of a better tomorrow. I grew to love the power of literature to open doors of introspection and conversation; politics and sociology and philosophy; analytical and creative responses.

9 My future biographers may describe my career choice as a matter of familial genetic destiny. My father was a professor of mechanical engineering. My mother taught elementary students, often those with rough home lives and classified with an alphabet soup of disorders.

Through their loving lifelong examples, my parents showed me that no other path offers more conscientious satisfaction and opportunity to help other people in meaningful ways.

I have been lucky to be sculpted by so many passionate educators, and I am fortunate to have a job that allows me to shape as I was shaped. It is this burning love for ideas and human transformation that makes me so eager to teach every day. If you’re going to make a difference in the lives of your students, you need to understand your own passions and find ways to make them visible.

Point them toward truth.

The classroom is a location of intriguing paradoxes. Primary among these is the split between truth and money. Truth is the source of real education — internal motivation, learning for its own sake, the pursuit of knowledge to enhance our understanding of the world, compassion for other humans, appreciating beauty and finding one’s place in the cosmos. Money is the rat race for short-term rewards — points, grades, letters, and numbers. The drive for carrots and candy; the bribe, the external motivator. It’s impossible to survive without either truth or money, and wherever you find one, you won’t find much of the other.

This paradox lies at the heart of teaching, for both educator and student. Obviously as a teacher, you need a paycheck. But no one goes into education to make fat bank. We teachers

10 enjoy getting gifts during Teacher Appreciation Week, but we know that the real rewards are in the minds of young people. We need money, of course, but we live and work for truth in the purest sense of the word.

Most students (like most adults, especially in America) are trained to chase money. As the Wu-Tang Clan said: “Cash Rules Everything Around Me — C.R.E.A.M. / Get the money /

Dollar dollar bill, y’all”. They want grades, they want extra credit. If it’s not for points or some other reward, they often will not do it. It’s what our system has trained them to focus on. This is true across age ranges, class varieties, and ability levels. On the flip side, students fear losing points. They fear punishment and worry constantly about how to recoup lost numbers. As

Chuang-Tzu said in the 3rd century BCE: “Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.”

Sometimes this fixation on reward and punishment produces dramatic results like plagiarism or other forms of cheating; usually it’s less exciting. But it’s always sad to see a student do just enough to get a passing grade, or complain endlessly about two points taken off for unclear writing.

As a teacher, your job is to fight the systematic preoccupation with money, and help your students move toward truth. Part of this happens through your example, although there are plenty of teachers who focus on money, in various forms. The best educators use analogy and methods of discovery to show young people why, in the words of Bob Marley, “Wisdom is better than silver and gold.” (“Zion Train”, 1980.)

After high school, I went to a tiny liberal arts school called New College of Florida, which has 700 students and no grades. It was the perfect undergraduate environment for me —

11 without the spectre of money hanging over me, I could fully explore and expand my quest for truth. I could finally ask myself: “Okay, if I’m not doing this for a grade, then why am I doing ​ ​ this?” Without the intellectual freedom (and responsibility) that New College provided, I ​ ​ wouldn’t be half the scholar I am today. I wouldn’t have learned (and taught myself) so many things about writing, teaching, and literary analysis. While I can’t offer the same freedom to my high school students, I do insist that they confront the money/truth paradox.

I know how much pressure young people face to get good grades, especially in Advanced

Placement courses, where a passing grade on the exam can translate into actual money saved in college. But I’m a teacher of truth, not money. I will of course provide all the necessary training and guidance I can, to help kids do well on the various exams they face, but I refuse to make the paper chase my only — or even primary — goal.

Therefore, my classroom is also a place where we discuss philosophy and politics. We argue about bad movies and popular music. The students complain about The Simpsons and I ​ ​ complain about Family Guy. We enjoy passionate discussions, interrogate our systems of ​ ​ morality, and reflect on our assumptions. These discussions are always respectful, of course, and they are done in the spirit of dialectic, not debate. More on that in a later section.

The world does not need more swarms of self-interested career-obsessed people who only think about short-term gains. (Wall Street is full of such people already.) We need legions of intelligent, engaged global citizens, willing to sacrifice personal gain once in a while, in order to bring about larger, long-term improvements in the worldwide human condition, so that we can all live happier, more fulfilling lives. This is the primary focus of my pedagogical praxis. ​

12 Of course the world also does not need unemployable starry-eyed layabouts, who don’t contribute to society. Therefore — once again — the key is balance. We teachers must feed the students’ minds and souls, while also helping them to fill their bank accounts. We must push students to reach high academic standards and live according to decent standards of human ​ ​ behavior. We must prepare them for higher learning and/or the workplace, while also helping them to enjoy the music along the way. As WEB DuBois said in The Souls of Black Folk: “The ​ ​ true college will ever have but one goal: not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.” The same is true of secondary education.

Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

By the time they reach high school, many students have come to loathe education. Often they equate learning and books with everything they dislike about school: rote memorization, tiresome monotone lectures, and exams focused on trivial minutiae. In many ways this is the school’s fault. Many classrooms are filled with tedious drills, pointless busywork, and material that is never connected to the students’ worlds. Of course sometimes these things are unavoidable — it’s hard to make gerunds fascinating, and every class has students with wildly differing needs and interests.

On the other hand, many students are convinced that they’ll never need what the teacher is offering, even when the class is well-run and dynamic. Some kids think they’ll get rich through professional sports or “reality” TV. And who cares if you can’t communicate, when

13 you’re rich? There are many reasons for these attitudes, to which I shall return in the next chapter.

Given all of these challenges, I enter the classroom every day with two missions in mind:

Remind the unmotivated students about why learning is fun/important; and push the motivated kids to see things differently and discover new stuff. As the saying goes: Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

This can be an exhausting balancing act. The unmotivated students will often refuse to cooperate or open their minds. The motivated students will often insist that they can already see everything there is to see. To make matters more interesting, the same student might be motivated one day and unmotivated the next.

You may have noticed that I refer to students as “motivated” and “unmotivated”, rather than the usual classifications of “good” and “bad”, or “advanced” and “basic”, or

“high-achieving” and “low-achieving”. These attempts to pigeonhole a student’s essence or ability usually don’t do much good, except to give us teachers an easy way to think about our classes. But why should that be easy? Isn’t it worthwhile to be more nuanced, even if it’s more difficult? The more you think of a kid as “bad” or “low-performing”, the more likely you to cut corners (or lower the bar) with him/her/them. The teacher’s mindstate can have a powerful (often subconscious) impact on how s/he relates to the student, so it’s important that we stay positive and resist the temptation to get mentally lazy. (For more information on how mindsets can affect outcomes, check out an episode of the NPR Invisibilia podcast from January 2015 called “How ​ ​ to Become Batman”.)

14 Every teacher worth their salt should be working at all times to make her/himself obsolete. Too many students become reliant on teachers — for answers, for spelling, even for paper and pencils. The best thing a teacher can do is help the kid learn how to be intellectually self-reliant.

Of course this requires lots of hard work from both teacher and student; as a result, many students prefer the ScanTron™ quiz and the path of least resistance. A good teacher must also get in touch with her/his inner tyrant. I sometimes find myself in crummy situations where I must ignore what the student says about her/his needs, and insist that I know better — despite the obvious conflict with the aforementioned admonition against the phrase “Because I said so.” I tell young people that I am channelling themselves from ten years in the future. “You’re telling me to tell you to quit slacking off,” I’ll say.

Mr. Miyagi is a perfect guide here. Daniel-San thinks painting the fence is stupid, but it’s exactly what he needs to do. We teachers are important in part because we have the wisdom to figure out which tasks are important for students in the medium and long term, even if they don’t see it for themselves. I tell my students that learning about gerunds is like painting the fence. The few students who have seen the movie get the reference, but of course they’re not usually the kids who need encouragement. Alas.

Making yourself obsolete as a teacher can also be a terrifying proposition when a student actually rises to the challenge. Watching a student get better than me at a particular task is great in theory, but we teachers have egos too! Unfortunately, some teachers cling to the egotistical notion that the student can’t possibly know more than the teacher (or that admitting such a thing ​ ​ will make the teacher look weak), and silly conflicts arise as a result. But it’s healthy for teachers

15 to be challenged — it keeps us on our toes. Just challenge us with respect, please, would ya, kids?

The other terrifying reality every teacher must confront is the student who will not succeed in school. On one end of the spectrum here is Erin Gruwell, who describes in her book

The Freedom Writers Diary how she motivated every one of her students in South Central Los ​ ​ ​ Angeles to succeed in English class and attend college. Well, crap. How did she do that?

(Apparently it involved working two jobs to buy copies of The Diary of Anne Frank and having ​ ​ a student on house arrest read the entire book in one night.) I’m convinced there’s some part of the story that’s still untold — otherwise why doesn’t she explain what the rest of us are doing wrong? If she can do all that in South Central, and I can’t convince some middle-class kids in suburban Wisconsin to do their Creative Writing projects, I must be a really weak teacher.

The truth, obviously, is that some things are simply beyond our control as classroom teachers. In 2010 the US Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences released a report entitled Error Rates in Measuring Teacher and School Performance Based on Student ​ Test Score Gains. This report explains the incredible difficulty we encounter when schools try to ​ use test scores to determine teacher effectiveness. The most striking line in the report comes in

"Chapter 5: Summary and Conclusions", on page 35: "Our results are largely driven by findings from the literature and new analyses that more than 90 percent of the variation in student gain scores is due to the variation in student-level factors that are not under control of the teacher." ​ ​ (Original emphasis.) If the US Department of Education is to be believed, teachers should be held responsible for 10% of a student’s test score fluctuation.

16 This is heresy in the modern world of pedagogical theory, of course. The current mania for “reform” insists that the teacher is responsible for 100 percent of a student’s test score gains

— or lack thereof. And the spectre of so-called “value-added models” brings a veneer of objective scientific authority to the table. Even class size is irrelevant, we’re told, so long as there’s a “good teacher” (according to some arcane formula no one can quantify with any precision) at the helm.

Which is not to say that every teacher is doing a good, or even adequate, job. At the other end of the spectrum from Ms. Gruwell are the teachers who assume that every failing kid just isn’t trying hard enough. They insist that they don’t need to change a thing about their teaching, or cater to the students’ interests in any way. If every kid were to fail the class, they would just shrug and say “Kids today lack the proper work ethic.”

Then (back to the other side) there are the teachers who (like me) murder themselves with anxiety and spend all their energy about how they’re going to reach the failing kids. We watch as our gentle persuasion fails to bring about a change. We watch the student crumple up and throw away our written reminders about missing work. We contact parents and watch things continue as before. (Often the students get mad because they want to leave their folks out of it and “after all it’s my grade”.) We read emails about the student getting suspended for possession of contraband. We hear from the guidance counsellor about all of the problems the student is having. At the end of the semester, we sigh as we enter the final failing grade, wondering what we might have done better, and making mental notes about how we’ll approach the next unmotivated student differently.

17 I had an excellent mentor in graduate school named Dr. Wright. Unlike many at the

College of Education, he had spent decades in secondary school classrooms, and his love for young people was made obvious by the warmth and dedication he showed us. Dr. Wright once said: “You can’t save every kid who’s failing. Pick five.” I nodded, but said to myself: “No way!

I’m gonna save everybody!” ​ ​ Well, I’ve come to understand that the only people who can save failing students are the students themselves. We teachers can — and we must — provide motivation, encouragement, ​ ​ insight, expectations, guidance, logic, humor, compassion, concern, and condemnation of dysfunctional behaviors. We must hold ourselves accountable for pushing students, hard. We must push ourselves to do everything in our power to push young people to achieve their full potential and actualize the best dreams of their ancestors.

But we must also understand that we’re not magic, and we cannot force recalcitrant students to learn and succeed. Morpheus can only show Neo the door — in the end Neo must choose to take the red pill. We don’t have the spellcasting abilities of Harry Potter (or Polgara, ​ for the Eddings fans out there). I’m tired of hearing pompous advocates of education “reform” — most of whom have never taught a day in their lives — insist that good teachers can miraculously repair years of deep dysfunction in one school year. I’m sick of watching my brightest, most dedicated colleagues exhaust themselves and languish in a spirit of frustration because they are unable to save every student.

We arrive, therefore, at an important moment of crossover in my life. Buddhism is about finding The Middle Way, and Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching stresses the need to balance the yin and ​ ​ the yang. These philosophies have informed my adult life and are central to my success in the

18 classroom. (Many other traditions also address the need for balance; this need not be a religious conversation.) As teachers, we must balance our love for every student with an appreciation for the scale and scope of the obstacles along the way. We can’t let ourselves be complacent to slackitude, but neither can we instantly wipe away years of bad habits, and whatever else is holding the kid back.

After all, we’re no good to anyone if we’re burned out or filled with cynical pathology.

As Richard Thieme wrote in his 2004 article “My Last Talk with Gary Webb”: “The passion for truth and justice is not a sprint. It’s a long-distance run that requires a different kind of training, a different degree of commitment.” We have to remember that education is a process, and the seeds we plant may not germinate quickly. Some won’t ever sprout.

Nevertheless, we must be relentless in our efforts. You never know which student will turn it around, or how, or why. Once I had a student named Betty (not her real name). During the first class she took with me, Betty always had her head down. She refused to do work, she refused to take notes, she never asked questions, and barely read the things I gave her to read.

I tried using humor and gentle encouragement to motivate Betty, but she resisted. Hard.

She said plainly to me that she did not care about school, and thought all the stuff we did was a ​ ​ waste of time. When my happy-fun persuasion didn’t work, I tried to use logic and forceful argument to show her all the potential she had as a person. I explained to her that she owed it to herself to work hard now, so she wouldn’t have to work so hard in the future. Still she resisted. ​ ​ So I became a tyrant. I turned to brute strength and iron-fisted authority. “Quit whining and do it,” I said. I hate being a tyrant, because it makes me feel like a jerk and it makes the ​ ​

19 student feel like a child. But sometimes I have no choice. I stood over Betty and yelled at her and refused to back down until she got out her paper and wrote down the notes.

Eventually, after many months of my tyranny (and lots of encouragement from other people), Betty changed. In less than a year she began pushing herself, and I was able to back off. ​ ​ She kept signing up for classes with me, and I was overjoyed to see her in the room. By her senior year she was blazing up every lesson I offered, even tackling complicated Shakespearean comparisons when other students went for more basic options. I’d never seen a student change so much. To this day I’m not really sure why or how it happened. But it did.

In 2010, Betty finished her first year of college, and she updated her Facebook page by writing: “I made it through my first year! In your face, everyone who said I couldn’t do it!” And

I wrote back: “Told ya.”

This is not an isolated incident. Numerous students — including some who had their heads down every day, didn’t read the books, never showed any interest — have thanked me for not giving up on them. Alas, these prodigal sons and daughters usually don’t let us know how much we’ve affected them. As a result we must perform daily leaps of faith that we are getting ​ ​ (or will get) through to them. After a few years I began saving the cards and letters I’ve received from students in a file. When I have a rough day, I break it out and remind myself why I can’t stop.

I can’t stop because young people are fluid (and so are adults). Whatever essence an individual might have, it’s not all of a person. We can change our habits and become better than ​ ​ we were last year. It’s happened to me, and I’ve seen it happen to other people. The point is this:

If you believe that a student is fixed and unchanging, then why bother teaching at all? What a

20 tremendous disservice that teacher does to every kid every day. We teachers have a responsibility to envision what that student could become, even if we believe it’s unlikely that ​ ​ s/he will ever reach that potential. Anything less is unacceptable.

Of course this is much easier to say than it is to keep in mind, and I won’t argue if someone suggests that much of this book is a pep talk for my future self as much as anyone else.

One of the hardest parts of teaching for me — as noted — is being a tyrant. I don’t like being hard on students, especially because I know they’re usually going through things they don’t discuss. As the saying goes: “You must be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” My natural compassion often conflicts with my need to impose order in the classroom. This is especially difficult for the anarchists among us, who don’t like the idea of authority in the first place. More on that later.

But here’s something important I’ve learned: The pain that comes from being hard on a student isn’t nearly as painful as being inconsistent. If you forgive Student A for being late, and then get mad at Student B, then both students learn that you’re not being fair. And so does the ​ rest of the class. It’s a foolish teacher who believes that his/her actions only resonate with the ​ student(s) directly involved. As much as we talk about how students don’t pay attention and no one listens to us, the truth is that they are watching, and some of them are watching carefully. ​ ​ Most students respect teachers who are consistent with their consequences, even if it means you’re being a tyrant from time to time. Those times should be rare, and you should always have good reasons for your consequences, even if you can’t explain them in the moment.

Think of it this way: Students don’t respect cruel, arbitrary teachers. You must have compassion and reason, methods to your madness. But students also don’t respect meek, passive

21 teachers. (Those teachers also tend to be arbitrary.) Think of what a bad teacher Michael Scott from The Office would be. You can’t be everyone’s friend, and you won’t always be popular. ​ ​ The more you try, the less effective you’ll be. Paradoxically, the more effective you are, the more students will respect you. And if they’re kind students, that respect might eventually turn into friendliness.

Have fun.

The other thing I emphasize is having fun while we work hard. Too many classrooms are dull places, where both students and teachers feel trapped in a wretched cycle of mediocrity. To

Oblivion with such attitudes! (A crossover there for the video gamers. Fus Ro Dah!) I’m constantly making dumb jokes in the classroom and playing devil’s advocate and referencing movies, from The Usual Suspects to Billy Madison to Friday. I like to quote The Simpsons, but ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ so few students get the references these days. If I see a student zoning out, I will immediately call ​ ​ on her/him, or make some reference to a subject s/he loves. Sometimes this is hard to do, because

I occasionally have students who don’t appear to be passionate about anything.

My favorite economist these days is the Cambridge professor Ha-Joon Chang. His books

— the best of which is 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (2011) — are peppered ​ ​ with references to Lord of the Rings and Tom Cruise movies. His ability to make the history of ​ ​ economics interesting with pop culture references and sharp wit is an inspiration to educators everywhere.

22 I make fun of myself most of all, so the kids know I can take it, and I’m careful to avoid actually picking on students. This can be a fine line. Usually people who make obnoxious jokes are certain that the other party understands that they’re “just playing around”, but the person on the other end can feel quite different. I’ve made my share of these blunders; that’s why the comedian Jen Kirkman banned me from her Twitter feed. Story for another time.

Most students enjoy the inclusion of occasional shenanigans, and their feedback sometimes leads to amusing situations. My students and I do daily Journal Writing activities, and share our responses with each other. Once, after writing about the topic “Make a list of words that describe you”, I read my list aloud. When I finished, a student in the back quipped: “You forgot ‘obese’.” There were some chuckles, and I tried to roll with it, but it hurt more than I let on. “That’s a little harsh,” I said. “I mean, I put down ‘overweight’, but come on.” The student was confused, and after a few seconds there was more laughter. “No,” he said. “I said you’re a ​ beast.” (This is quite a compliment among the kids today.) Needless to say, I was amused and ​ relieved. I was also reminded of the need for us to make sure we respond to what a student actually says, not what we think he said. ​ ​ Even when students genuinely try to aggravate me, however, I usually find a way to have fun with my response. Usually this takes the form of loud mock outrage. (“What do you mean ​ you hate Star Wars!?”) Sometimes I’ll take a moment and explain to the person at length why ​ ​ it’s really not okay to make fun of someone for asking “a dumb question”. Every moment can be a teachable moment, if you’re a relentless pedantic didact. And when someone is clearly simply trying to provoke me, I will calm myself completely, and say: “Are you trying to get a rise out of me, Agent Kujan?” Only two students have ever caught this allusion.

23 The one situation I despise and fear most of all is the class that does not react to my jokes, provocations, or invitations. Sometimes I’ll get a room full of students that get none of my references, laugh at nothing I say, express no discernible opinions, and provide no meaningful feedback to the texts we read. They just want to get through class with as little effort as possible, and they’re absolutely determined to be bored while they do it.

It’s possible, of course, that I’m not as funny as I think I am, or that I have intimidated everyone into silence. Perhaps these students don’t have the real-world experience required to reflect thoughtfully on more sophisticated materials. But that doesn’t explain an entire class of silence. I’ll accept those explanations for 50% of the students, or even 70%. But when every single person in the room is tomb quiet, there’s something else going on. Besides, I put a wide variety of materials in front of the students: cartoons, Shakespeare, popular songs, funny

YouTube videos, etc etc. As Principal Skinner says in “The Boy Who Knew Too Much” (Season

Five of The Simpsons): “Am I out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.” ​ ​ Most of the time this doesn’t happen. There’s usually one student who mercifully flashes a little smile when I make a dumb joke. There are probably some kids who have opinions, but for whatever reason don’t feel comfortable expressing them in class. To them I say (like Gob Bluth in Arrested Development): Come on! Give me something to work with, people. ​ ​ ​ ​ More than anything, I’m known for being a loud and energetic teacher. I’m constantly apologizing to the poor souls living in classrooms beside mine — our boisterous repartee sometimes bleeds through the walls. But I will not apologize for being enthusiastic about books ​ ​ and learning. One of my favorite comments on RateMyTeachers.com was from an anonymous

24 student who wrote: “He trys way to hard to get the students to pay attention.” (That’s copied verbatim, errors and all.)

I am sometimes accused of being too loud. To this I can only reply: The problem isn’t that I’m too loud — it’s that most people are too quiet! I really do think most people are passive ​ ​ and docile when the condition of our world (and the sleepwalking state of many students) calls for more outrage, more volume, and more dissonance. Like the immortal rap group Public

Enemy, I aspire to be louder than a bomb.

Of course when a student has a headache, I can turn it down. I also recognize that my decibel excess sometimes conflicts with my desire to engage students in thoughtful discussion — but I don’t think spirited and loud has to mean uncivil or obnoxious. It’s easy for such discourse to become a shouting match, and that’s why I keep my tongue firmly planted in my cheek.

Enthusiasm is contagious, and I enjoy being the conduit of energy in the classroom. I’ve heard from some students that they look forward to my class, because it gives them an energy boost when they need it most. As I get older, I’m finding the need to limit my physical dramatics, but I can’t see myself ever stuck in one spot, leaning on a podium. (Once each semester, after the students get to know me, I will use the microphone and PA system in my classroom to be extra annoying. Let it never be said that our school can’t find money for what’s really important!) ​

Understand your unique position.

25 The American public school teacher is a unique species in the social world. Nowhere else can be found a parallel set of directives, impulses, and objectives.

You are my student. What, then, am I?

● I am not your friend. I want you to be happy, but I am not here to make you feel good. I ​ want to help you make sense of the world, but I can’t hold your hand when you're having

trouble, and I won't always be there for you. I need to give you the tools you need to

make me unnecessary; friends do not engineer their own obsolescence. Neither do friends

enforce rules on one another, or perform interrogations.

● I am not your parent. I spend a lot of time with you, and I have many life lessons to ​ teach. But I've only known you for a short time, and I probably won't be in close contact

with you when you graduate. I have a duty to teach you right from wrong, but our limited

time (and my limited resources, as well as requirements from the administration) limits

my influence on you in this regard. Besides, at the end of the day I go home and have the

luxury of forgetting all about you.

● I am not your boss. Despite the eager efforts of business leaders to recreate the school as ​ a pre-work institution, you are not my employee. I evaluate you like a boss does, but no

boss wants the employee to supercede him. Ours is a relationship not of production

and/or mere service, but of mutual development and humanistic evolution.

● I am not your comrade or brother-in-arms. While we need to support each other and ​ strive together toward enlightened consciousness, we are not intrinsically linked by

ideology. I have loyalties which must — once in a rare while — come before my

26 devotion to you. For instance, I gots to get paid. Taking action which would benefit you

but jeopardize my job is (almost) never an option.

● I am not your coach. I want to bring the whole class into the End Zone of Knowledge, ​ but there really is no team, and there is no way of winning the game. I have drills I can

put you through, but when all is said and done, education is a dance between you and the

books; I'm just in the way. While I expect you to give 110% for our sport, I can't kick you

off the team if you fail to meet my expectations.

● I am not your warden. Many students think of school as a jail, but I have more to do ​ than simply keep you in the room. Lock and key won't work to open minds; a healthy

democracy, indeed, requires minds that are not imprisoned. Besides, the repressive state ​ ​ apparatus is not in my toolbox. (It is, of course, available if I need it.)

● I am not your lawyer. I advocate for you, but there is no confidentiality assumption, nor ​ is there a third party for me to mediate. I will approach you with respect and trust, but I

do not represent you, nor do I try at all times to exploit small opportunities to achieve a

shortcut positive result for you. (Quite the opposite, most of the time!)

Thus, I am None of the Above. I am a guide, a path, a way, an elder -- lesser than the student, and greater. Not so happy, yet much happier. And so on. Extra credit if you recognize which

Shakespeare play that’s from.

Be a teacher.

27 Being a teacher means training yourself to have no idea who to believe.

Being a teacher means you — the lifeguard — must convince someone that he is drowning. He refuses to believe you, and you can't save him until he does.

Being a teacher means taking your undying love for literature, your unquenchable thirst for ideas, your relentless passion for imagination, your intense yen for the life of the mind, and gambling it all, handing it over, slowly through the years, until nothing is left, on the off chance that these seeds will someday blossom into a change of heart for people who appear to hate everything you love.

Being a teacher means resetting your expectations every twelve months. Six, if you teach only semester courses.

Being a teacher means saying the same thing over and over every day, year after year, while trying to remember that the students in front of you have never heard it before.

Being a teacher means you never have the luxury of ignoring someone — even if that person is annoying you.

Being a teacher means you host people who are forced to be guests in your home.

Being a teacher means doing tiny variations of the same homework assignment 60 times in one day. (We call it grading papers.) Think about reading a 300-page collection of stories.

Now imagine reading it carefully enough to give a comprehensive critique of every story. Now imagine having to do this in two weeks, while doing a million other things too. This is what I must do when my 20 Creative Writing II students hand me their independent projects, which average 15 pages each. (And that’s called “being lucky to have such a tiny class”.)

28 Being a teacher means instantly shedding your negative emotions once an hour every hour. If your second class was frustrating and annoying, you can't carry that feeling into your third class.

Being a teacher means you risk caring too much, to the detriment of your sanity. You must decide at times whether to turn off your heart or disbelieve what students say.

Being a teacher means you must always fight against abstract monsters.

Being a teacher means your short-term desire to care for others must be painfully balanced by your long-term interest in adolescent mental development.

Being a teacher means choosing constantly between being a sucker or being a monster.

With every decision you make, you will feel that you’re being too weak and spineless, or being too mean and ruthless. There is no third option, so your best bet is to vacillate evenly between the two.

Being a teacher means you torture yourself over decisions no one else will remember in a week.

Be a bodhisattva, not a pratyekabuddha. ​ ​ ​ ​ In an introductory lecture about Buddhism, the British academic Alan Watts once explained a choice that every enlightened practitioner must eventually face: To ascend to another plane of existence, beyond the suffering and turmoil of our own; or to re-enter the world and try to help others find enlightenment and serenity. As he said:

29 The bodhisattva that returns into the world and becomes involved again is, in fact, ​ ​ regarded as a superior kind of being to the one who gets out of it. The person who gets out of the rat race and enters into eternal peace is called pratyekabuddha, ​ ​ which means “private buddha” — buddha who does not teach, who does not help others. And in Mahayana literature, that is almost a term of abuse. […] The bodhisattva goes back into the cycle with his eyes wide open, voluntarily, and ​ allows himself to be sucked in. And this is normally interpreted as an act of supreme compassion.

This is what teaching is all about. Being a teacher means going “back into the cycle” every day to help others.

Like most of my colleagues, I could easily find more profitable work in some other field.

But we have made a choice to fight the abstract monsters of ignorance and distraction. Like

Robin Williams’ character in Good Will Hunting, we haven’t messed up — we have chosen to ​ ​ return to the world of suffering, apathy, and mindlessness, in order to awaken the minds of approaching generations.

I don’t wish to boast of my own good intentions, but I will demand a recognition that we are offering deeply of ourselves, for the betterment of society. We’ve chosen not to pursue the ​ ​ standard narrative of personal accumulation or notoriety. (Some of us pursue notoriety in other ways, heh.) Rather, we seek a betterment of all humanity, one young mind at a time. And while it’s hard sometimes to reconcile these lofty ideals with lessons on comma splices — or cosines, or the role of the plow in the settlement of Nebraska, or what have you — it remains a serious foundation for all conscious educators.

30 We’re told, especially in the world of economics, that all people operate fundamentally out of self-interest. I believe this to be true in a general sense, as Mark Twain explores in his

1906 dialogue What Is Man? But I also find an infinity of case studies where people do the exact ​ ​ opposite: driven by a love for humanity, and a vision of a better world, they sacrifice their own comfort and material desire to bring others out of darkness. Not just teachers, but also nurses, firefighters, social workers, community organizers, and humans in dozens of other fields.

Yes, we require paychecks, and of course we’re driven by a sense of personal satisfaction brought by the work. But I resist passionately the myth that humans cannot be asked to give of themselves — individually or in groups — because it goes against our nature. Our lives are a testament to other ways of living, loving, and giving back.

This is a quick tour of my passions as a teacher. Perhaps you, like me, are energetic. But there are plenty of passionate teachers who are chill and laid-back. Perhaps you’re also fanatical about cartoons or video games. But there are plenty of passionate teachers who are more into poetry and nature. The point is that your students — some of them, anyway, and more than you will realize at first — need to get inspired by whatever inspires you. Beyond all the official curricula and skill mastery, your number one job is to infect the kids with your love of learning.

Only you can figure out how you’re going to do that.

31

2. Students can get better.

“Why is non-violence such an important […] philosophy? Because it respects the capacity of human beings to grow — it gives them the opportunity to grow their souls, and we owe that to each other.”

Grace Lee Boggs On Revolution: A Conversation with Angela Davis (2012) ​

In his 1999 track “Fear Not Of Man”, rapper Mos Def muses on the future of hip-hop: “If hip-hop is about the people, and hip-hop won’t get better until the people get better, then how do people get better?” For educators of conscience, this question should also be at the center of our praxis: How do students get better?

The first and most important truth is that students can get better. Shocking as it may be ​ ​ for some people to hear, there are plenty of educators who believe that many (or most) of their students are incapable of improvement or growth. They might believe that the kids could get ​ ​ better someday far in the future, but it becomes a meaningless qualifier for the classroom. Good teachers go into the trenches every day with the conviction that they can help every student who comes through the door. (This, of course, contrasts painfully with the data in Chapter 1 about the tiny impact of the classroom effect — one more paradox that drives all educators.)

In 15 years of teaching, I have encountered a wide variety of students, struggling with all sorts of problems. Young people vary in all sorts of ways, from general ability to confidence level to learning style. Figuring out how to help these young people is a profoundly complex and complicated task. Doing so effectively is a mixture of science, art, instinct, guesswork, and alchemy. Unfortunately, many educators, education reformers, pundits, and politicians have

32 become fixated on a few specific elements in the equation, making easy answers and quick-fix solutions seem plausible.

If we want to help young people get better, we must start by acknowledging the scope of the problem. This point was made elegantly by Dr. Angel L. Harris of Duke University, during a

2011 panel discussion at Martha’s Vineyard. With regard to the achievement gap between black and white students, he said:

There’s a lack of respect for the problem. When I hear people say “We’ve got to fix this [achievement gap] within my political term”, to me that sounds like someone walking into an oncologist’s office saying: “You guys have been working on cancer for years, and you have a lot of money invested in this. Give me the cure by next week.” We wouldn’t do that, because we respect that problem. We want to travel 60 miles in two minutes.

As with all maladies, helping our students get better — however that needs to happen — begins with a proper diagnosis.

Abraham Maslow pointed out in his 1943 Theory of Human Motivation that each person ​ ​ must achieve a foundation of basic physiological needs (food, sleep, etc) and a sense of security

(for one’s body, property, and resources) before tackling higher-level challenges. Obviously we humans are a constant work-in-progress, and most theorists would agree that we are capable of transcending the structure in some ways. Still, Maslow’s theory makes sense as a basis for examining who achieves what, and why.

As educators, we should note that most of the skills we ask students to practice

(creativity, problem-solving) are located in the top layer of Maslow’s hierarchy. It makes sense, therefore, that a student who is unable to find belonging among friends or family will have difficulty approaching the challenge of examining her assumptions (to give just one example).

33 At the same time, this is forever a cyclical process. Sometimes, by participating in a classroom activity in which all students examine their assumptions, the student may find the belonging she seeks. This may make it easier for her to self-reflect further in the future. On the other hand, if a student lacks a sense of security with regard to resources (belief that future employment prospects are dim, for example), he may be unwilling to participate meaningfully in the assumption-examination activity, and therefore miss out on the sense of belonging achieved by others. (Still, he may find a perverse counter-belonging belonging by connecting with others who also refuse to participate meaningfully in the assumption-examination activity.)

One of the biggest problems we face as educators is that very often we don’t know which ​ ​ needs are being met for students, and which are not. Sometimes the student herself cannot understand (or explain) which needs aren’t being met. Ironically, it is often through self-actualizing internal interrogation that she can begin to understand what may be missing from other levels of the hierarchy.

Everybody in the school does heroic work to help students meet their needs — the kitchen staff and custodial crew work tirelessly to help students meet their most essential physiological needs; administrators and police officers handle security issues; the good people in

Student Services take the lead on belongingness and esteem needs; and then (hopefully) the students are ready for the self-actualizing activities in our classrooms. But at any given time, our roles can be shifted and suddenly a member of the kitchen staff offers a kind word, helping a student feel a sense of belonging. Or a classroom teacher might remove a dangerous insect, providing a sense of safety.

34 Many of the reforms and directives to which we teachers must adapt come from business-model thinking and high0stakes testing impulses. These models focus on data and research, both of which are important pieces of the puzzle. But when focusing on data, it’s easy to ignore Maslow’s entire framework for understanding human motivation. By enshrining test scores as the sole altar of our attention — and insisting that teachers alone are responsible for their rise or fall — the narrow view attempts to substitute short-term point gains on decontextualized exams for the long-term betterment of young minds that should be the true goal of all quality education. And, as we’ve seen over and over in recent years, many schools are fudging the numbers to show those short-term gains.

Worse, the short-circuit approach of forcing students to give the appearance of self-actualizing right away on a standardized test (often with the belief that it will affect their basic sense of security in the future, in the form of job opportunity or time spent on remedial work) has the potential to eviscerate the more substantial motivating factors that make us want to learn in the first place. Put another way: a student who is drilled endlessly on basic memorization trains her brain in that direction, and becomes less willing to try creative problem-solving and intertextual connectivity. (This is not to say we don’t have to memorize things sometimes.)

Education historian Diane Ravitch and political economist Jean Anyon have pointed to the urgency of addressing poverty among students, but there are obviously many other factors as well. A student from a background of economic comfort might wrestle with other areas of insecurity, such as abuse, neglect, or divorce; degraded self-image; lack of rest due to a hectic after-school work schedule (either because his family needs the money or because he wants to buy some electronic gadget); or a combination of these and other factors. To add yet another

35 layer of complexity, sometimes a student will feign one obstacle to success, while the actual problem lies elsewhere.

I do not believe that educators can do nothing to help students deal with the various deficits in their individual hierarchies of needs. But I know — from my own experience, and my years in the classroom — that a journey into authentic self-actualized intellectual exploration is a long and complicated expedition. Perhaps Student A needs patient understanding and empathy, while Student B needs stern discipline. And the reverse may be true the very next day! Like many teachers, I sicken myself with worry that perhaps I’m not being rigorous enough with some students, or that I’m being too demanding of others. Once again, it is a matter of balance.

Alas, the more we push every student toward a uniformity of thought and activity, the less we can help students become metacognitively aware of their own academic, social, emotional, and intellectual needs. In the end, however, this awareness is precisely what each student needs, because it is the only way for them to grow and get better. Real change only ever happens when we believe it’s necessary and possible. Other people can push us in the right direction, but no one can make it happen.

The other irony here is that helping students truly get better requires individual attention.

The more students we pack into a classroom, the more likely teachers are to miss important opportunities to help students explore their minds and selves. For example: In my Creative

Writing classes, I meet with each student during our larger independent projects, and I’m able to discuss issues related to their thought processes, personal histories, and artistic inclinations.

When a class swells to 30 students, these conversations are clipped and truncated at best.

Unfortunately, the trend in education “reform” is to insist that class size doesn’t matter at all. Big

36 shots like Bill Gates have offered mountains of research supposedly proving this, but it flies in the face of what many teachers experience every day in the classroom — not to mention the standards at the private Lakeside School which Gates loved so much. I don’t like to be dismissive of research, but I also don’t like to have my reality in situ ignored, either. ​ ​

Hug the kids and kick their butts.

Students come into the classroom with a variety of traumas causing them stress — some fresh, some stale. Some are severe, others are minor. We ignore these traumas at our peril, but there is also a danger of allowing minor traumas (or imaginary traumas, whether invented by student or teacher) to become major excuses. Put another way: Some students need a hug, and others need a kick in the butt. I don’t hug students much, but that can serve as a symbol for patience, understanding, and compassion. It should go without saying that I don’t kick students at all, anywhere, but that image can serve as a symbol for discipline and high expectations.

The trick is figuring out which is which. If you kick a student who needs a hug, you will compound his pain and stress, making success in the classroom more improbable, if not impossible. If, on the other hand, you hug a kid who needs a kick in the butt, you allow him to slack off when he needs to be working.

We each face this same dilemma within ourselves. You know when you’re being lazy, and when you need some time to rest. It’s easy (and hazardous) to let sloth overtake us, but it’s also dangerous to work too much. Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says:

37 “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” (Look it up.)

Some students will take advantage of their post-traumatic stress to declare the right to be lazy. Other students will do the exact opposite, and try to ignore their post-traumatic stress, pushing themselves too hard and refusing any help. I’ve found that the percentage of my students in each of these dysfunctional camps is about the same; maybe 15% or so.

Once again, the correct path involves individual attention and metacognition. Students will rarely open up to a large group of people, especially strangers. Hearing a teacher say “You need to work on X” might ring true and inspire a burst of healthy change. But this change will be deeper, more thorough, and more authentic if it comes from within the student. In other words:

We don’t just need to hand students aloe vera when they get a sunburn; we need to help them understand their risk of burning, and when to come inside.

The traumas experienced by students are all over the map. I’ve had students who were dealing with physical abuse, sexual violence, neglect, emotional manipulation, economic hardship, homelessness, eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide attempts that only failed because of incredible coincidence. I’ve also had students who were dealing with banal teenage angst, dissatisfaction with part-time jobs, fading cell phone batteries, insufficient time for video games, speeding tickets, and — most frequently — relationship drama that eclipses everything in the universe, and then evaporates after 24 hours.

The serious traumas are no joke. Left unaddressed, they can infect the minds of young people (and adults, of course), festering into self-loathing, blind rage, and worse. In other words:

If we don’t help young people get better, they’ll likely make life more difficult for others. On the

38 other hand, if we do help young people get better, then they’re more likely to do well in school ​ ​ (and elsewhere), and they’re more like to help other people get better. As Fania Davis said in a ​ ​ ​ ​ workshop on restorative justice I once attended: “Harmed people harm people. Healed people heal people.”

So how do we tell whether a young person’s traumas are serious or superficial? It’s only after we get to know a student that we can even tell which kind of trauma(s) she’s dealing with.

This takes months, especially in the hour-long chunks of high school interaction, most of which are filled with curriculum work, another dichotomy we’ll explore in a moment. In the meantime, we’re left to hypothesize about whether we need to offer a hug or a kick in the butt.

Think about a homeless guy on the street: Do you give him some change, or not? They say a bleeding heart is better than none at all. What if he’s being lazy or refusing help? What if your spare change enables him (and others) to continue panhandling, rather than making bigger changes in his life? On the other hand, what if he’s suffering from horrible depression and visions of ending it all? Couldn’t your thirty cents restore some of his faith in humanity? Maybe it’s the last little bit of money he needs to get something to eat for the first time that day. Usually we don’t know, and we’ll probably never know.

For these reasons, I tend to err on the side of compassion and caution. I’d rather have a student take advantage of my kindness than risk further traumatizing someone who is suffering from some serious difficulties. The corollary to this compassion of mine, however, is an insistence that students be honest with me — and with themselves. When they turn in late work, they must explain why. If they come to class late, they must explain why. If they are rude to me, or to their classmates, they must explain why. I usually handle this with a form (see Chapter 6),

39 mostly because I don’t like to stop class to put a student on the spot. As often as not, that spotlight encourages buffoonery and/or power struggles. When it’s in writing, it’s much more likely to be a simple conversation between the student and me.

I’m constantly (and pleasantly) surprised by the honesty I see on these forms. Plenty of students will claim “I didn’t have enough time”, but many others will admit “I was lazy” or “I made math class a priority”. This honesty serves two vital purposes: First, as noted, it builds that foundation of trust that can be essential for future dealings. Second, and perhaps even more important, it helps the students approach life with a mind full of mindfulness, willing to accept reality — rather than always searching for shortcuts or loopholes. Usually students learn to realize that my penalties for being lazy are significant but not apocalyptic. As a result they come to understand that the spectrum of options goes from lying laziness (worst) to honest laziness

(medium) to honest hard work (best). One reason young people lie so often is because some adults react with an explosive lack of compassion when they hear the truth. Even when the truth makes me angry, I always start by saying “Thank you for being honest.”

This focus on honesty works. Not just for me as a teacher, but for the students as well.

My students thank me often for treating them like adults. It helps them sort out what respect and being an adult means. As often as not, they realize it means that no one can tell them how to get ​ ​ better.

In some ways, helping students get better is a process of space-making and freedom. We can tell students what to do and how to live and which mistakes to avoid, but the most valuable insights young people are likely to absorb are those gained from experience and reflection. This belief informs the structure of Montessori schools and Dewey-style progressive education (as

40 well as my undergraduate alma mater, New College of Florida). Most public schools in the US are structured differently, and finding ways to help students get better can be tough when The

Man is insisting on higher test scores and Adequate Yearly Progress. (Of course, the AYP acronym gets rearranged every few years; at the time of this writing the current fashion is to speak of “Value-Added Models” of instruction and “Student Learning Objectives”. Old wine in new bottles.)

Good teachers strive to find the balance of discipline and compassion in ways that go beyond mere data. Every teacher has heard the tired line about how “The most important things can’t be measured”, usually in passing before we’re instructed on how to measure students in some new way. But it’s true. The best moments in my classroom have nothing to do with grades or test scores or progress reports. They’re about ending self-harm, stashing cell phones, and taking painful steps out of the shadows.

Balance curriculum and life.

So how do we help students make sense of their lives, when so much attention is focused ​ ​ on academic curriculum? This is another dichotomy I discuss with students at the start of each semester, along with the “money / truth” discussion from Chapter 1. I explain that I’ve been hired to teach them about writing decent sentences and paragraphs, analyze texts, and think critically. But I explain that I also have a responsibility to make them better citizens — of their community, their nation, their planet.

41 Whereas the curriculum focuses on literature and gerunds and comma splices, life education revolves around philosophy, sociology, curiosity, and knowledge of self. Most students feel exhausted with curriculum work by the time they reach me at the end of high school. They much prefer discussing the nature of human existence. Some students, on the other hand, are fixated on mastering the curriculum (usually in the name of college transcripts, AP exams, and resumes); they’re the kids who complain when we “chase shiny things” (in the words of an AP coordinator I once worked with).

Fortunately, I teach classes that allow us to do both of these things at once. The first ten minutes of my Creative Writing I class, for example, is spent on Journal Writing. I put a different topic on the board every day: “What’s your favorite movie and why?”, for example. They can respond with a list, or write paragraphs, or — if they have nothing to say about the topic I’ve provided — write about their weekend, or why they hate school, or whatever. The only rule is:

They must write for ten full minutes. ​ ​ Mixing up the topics allows us to explore dozens of different domains, ranging from the academic (“What are the top ten mistakes students make?”) to the deeply philosophical (“What is the meaning of life?”) to the goofy (“Write a funny joke, or write about something funny that happened to you or a friend.”) to the personal (“Write about an embarrassing moment.”). We write and then discuss, first with neighbors through the “pair and share” technique, then together as a class. I always share my own embarrassing moments and mistakes and foibles, but I also celebrate my improvements and victories.

Along the way, three things take place, which the students usually don’t even recognize until the end of the semester. The first is the creation of classroom community. They get to know

42 each other in ways that usually never happen in school. They share injuries and heartbreak, accidents and disaster. They crack wise and poke fun, add on and respond to each other. There are no group hugs or love trains, but connections are made and we support each other.

The second benefit is improved writing. Just as Daniel-San learns to fight by painting the fence, my students find their sentences improving with each entry. Some improve more than others, of course. Some kids never see Journal Writing as anything more than a chore; they remain manacled to scribbled gibberish or tedious banality. But those who commit to the mindful practice of authentic exercise are pleasantly surprised to find themselves becoming more skilled and confident, even without endless drills on compound sentences or dangling participles.

The third benefit is writing for purposes of mental emancipation. As the banner at the front of my classroom says: “Writing Liberates”. Steve Biko understood this, as did Frederick

Douglass. William Lloyd Garrison, Sarah Schulman, Toni Morrison, Edward Said — these people have used writing as a pathway to freedom of all kinds. Writing helped me cope with the death of my father when I was 16, and it’s helped me strengthen the love I share with my mother, brother, friends, and wife.

My students get this. I’ve begun collecting letters from students who explain how writing has helped them deal with stress, relate to family, and focus their minds. They link the fun we have in Creative Writing I to their college entrance essays. They describe the thrill they feel when they produce successful writing of all kinds. Nothing gives me more satisfaction than helping young people discover the power of writing to get free.

Similar opportunities are available in other classes, too. My Interdisciplinary Poetics hip-hop class features a Daily Lyrical Analysis, which launches discussions of all kinds. In AP

43 English, conversations about novels like Grendel and The Bluest Eye open doors into political ​ ​ ​ ​ philosophy, existentialism, and sociocultural norms. I’m sure these discussions are more difficult in math or science courses, but not impossible. The first step in finding a balance between curriculum and life is deciding that it’s important.

Another powerful tool for helping students get better is leading them to a successful completion of curricular work itself. When a student gets a good score on an assignment, it can provide a powerful ego boost and sense of self-worth. Therefore the split between curriculum and life isn’t always distinct or important.

On the other hand, it’s easy to get carried away with this mindset. For one thing, getting a student to succeed in a less-important task can be counter-productive. I once went to a workshop where the instructor held a plastic cup out and asked volunteers to throw pennies into it. For the first volunteer, he stood right beside the person so she could drop the pennies in without any effort whatsoever. For the second, he turned the cup upside down so the volunteer’s task was impossible. For the third, he placed the cup right-side-up and stood three feet away.

The first setup, our instructor explained, is too easy. Students “succeeding” in this task feel no satisfaction or pride. (This is a common problem in some video games.) The second setup is too difficult; students grow frustrated. Some blame themselves, while others (rightly) blame the teacher for creating a job beyond their capacity. The third setup is perfect. Students are not likely to make every shot, but when they do, they feel an excitement and satisfaction that encourages them to keep working at it.

Some teachers give their students lessons of the first type; they offer simple (and simplistic) assignments that provide warm fuzzy feelings without requiring any effort. Other

44 teachers expect the impossible from their students, as in the second scenario. They dump hours and hours of homework on the kids every night, most of it meaningless busywork. The best teachers find ways to create assignments that are challenging without being impossible, rewarding without being facile.

This becomes more complicated when we realize that every student is at a different place on the path of mastery. What’s challenging for one student will be simple for another, and although my lesson on gerunds might be totally new for Student A, it’s something that Student B has covered six times in four years. The need for us to differentiate is another reason why larger classes make life more difficult for teachers and students.

For students at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy, curriculum is an appropriate focus; philosophical questions can be an irritating distraction. But for students struggling with serious despair or trauma, philosophical questions can be a matter of life and death.

Confront the one truly serious pedagogical question.

My happiest moment in two decades of teaching came several years ago, when a student confided to me: “Ever since I started keeping a journal, I haven’t been cutting.” This student had experienced deep loss and trauma in her short life, and turned to self-harm as a way to cope. As

Susanna Schrobsdorff’s November 2016 Time cover story explains, American adolescents are ​ ​ experiencing an epidemic of anxiety and depression, which often leads to self-medication

(cannabis, alcohol, video games) or self-harm (trichotillomania, cutting, suicide). In the article, a

45 student named Faith-Ann Bishop describes her reasons for cutting: “it was my only coping mechanism. I hadn’t learned any other way”.

If Camus was right when he declared that “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide”, then educators must urgently consider the possibility that some parallel concern should lie at the heart of our pedagogy. English teachers have a special power

— and therefore a special responsibility — to engage students on issues connected to trauma and sustaining what Cornel West called “a blood-drenched hope”. Confronting loss in an open and honest way is essential for a conscious classroom, and is inextricably linked to the prevention of self-harm among young people. Students in my classroom use fictionalized presentations of self, lyrical creations, and no-nonsense analysis of authors like Edwidge Danticat, Stephen King, and

Donald Goines to construct bridges of consciousness from their pressurized lives to the release valves of the written word.

Why of the Storm

My first writing class contained mostly unmotivated students who demanded to know why writing mattered. After my usual explanations received eye-rolling and angry yawns, I developed a presentation called “10 Reasons You Need to Learn How to Write (Whether You

Plan to Attend College or Not)”. I now give this presentation in the first week of every class.

When I reach Reason #7 (“You will almost certainly have a chance to say a few words someday at somebody’s funeral”), things get real. I ask if any students have been in this unfortunate situation. One or two brave students will describe speaking at an aunt’s funeral, or a memorial service for a grandparent.

46 Then I explain how my father died when I was 16 years old. I describe the difficulty of explaining, in two minutes to a church of 200 people, what my father meant to me. I explain how helpful it had been for me to write weird little stories all my life, because it had trained in me an eye for detail. I describe(d) how my father used to take me out to breakfast at McDonald’s on

Sunday mornings, flip the placemats over, and draw diagrams to explain scientific concepts.

This process is a crucial practice of demonstrating what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledge”, where “partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims”. This distinction is axiomatic to the lived experience of most students anyway; I am especially concerned for the student who has not bought into the standard proclamations from educators about the self-evident/faux-objective importance of writing—especially in an age of voice-activation, virtual reality, and auto-correcting microtexts.

Not for nothing is the next sentence in Haraway’s essay: “These are claims on people’s lives”.

Student reactions to my announcement are mixed. I recognize the flash of recognition from students who have experienced similar loss. I feel the shift of awareness in the room as attention snaps away from windows or screens. One time a student approached me, very timidly, after class to ask if there were a particular book that helped me deal with that situation. After I mentioned a few authors (Lao Tsu, Bill Watterson, Roger Zelazny), she explained how she had found her father after he committed suicide.

This pattern of stark honesty on my part is de rigueur throughout the semester, and is ​ ​ essential for a true human connection between pupil and educator. I mix it with a constant effort to treat the students like adults. I quote the poet Saul Williams, from his classic 2001 track

“Coded Language”: “Your current frequencies of understanding outweigh that which has been

47 given for you to understand”. True to the author's maxim of showing and not telling, I explain how the works of Marge Piercy, Maya Angelou, Chinua Achebe, and Isaac Asimov provided life-saving bridges for my young mind. I share my writing aloud, to demonstrate the importance of ongoing lifelong practice.

When a colleague of mine was recently murdered by her mentally ill son, I realized that she had taught me something vital about overcoming fear with love. And then I realized this is what teaching is all about. Behind all the talk of SLOs and PPGs and ACT and NCLB and PBIS and RTI and IEPs and 504s and ELL and ESL and 21st century learning and differentiation and scaffolding and personalized curriculum and bundled classes and flexible scheduling, and all the rest of it, is one simple question: Can you love the students enough—get them to love themselves enough—to conquer their fear of failure? Can you teach them how to be more human?

The banner in my classroom reads “Writing Liberates”, a maxim declaring the everyday urgency of the curriculum. I explain that humans require all manner of liberation: political, economic, social, spiritual, emotional, mental, intellectual, psychological, familial, and technological. I offer a playbook sculpted from the pains and progress endured by myself, their ancestors, and sages from around the world. It is a collection of mindsets that offers more than just increased test scores or college entrance (significant though those can be); it suggests a way of answering The One Truly Serious Pedagogical Question.

For these (and many other) reasons, I am fortunate to teach Creative Writing at the high school level, as well as a course on rap music and hip-hop culture I designed called

Interdisciplinary Poetics. They allow students to discover individualized forms of self-expression to address whichever deficits in Maslow’s hierarchy they might experience, using a variety of

48 Gardner’s intelligences. Although I have sculpted unique methods of confronting loss and grief in these classes, similar approaches can be employed across the English curriculum, and beyond.

The use of authentic, vital communication is essential for teachers wishing to engage in what young people call “real talk”, and educational purveyors of language have an urgent responsibility to link classroom lessons with a reality beyond the walls of the building. Death is not the only painful reality with which teenagers must cope, but every classroom contains at least one student wrestling with one stage of grief or another. The cases of self-harm and attempted suicide to which we bear witness are, we can be sure, merely the tip of the iceberg.

Reading, Writing, and Reckoning

The centrality of death to classic texts like Antigone, Beowulf (and Grendel), Hamlet, and ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Beloved is no accident. Sophocles understood that “From Death alone [humans] shall procure no ​ escape”, and that we avoid such deliberations at our own peril. This becomes an ironically happy circumstance when we seize the power of these considerations to reach students and allow them to voice grief in their own language. This opens the door to meaning, in cosmos both micro and macro (as well as meta).

“This business of meaning,” Stephen King points out in On Writing, “is a very big deal. ​ ​ If you doubt it, think of all the times you’ve heard someone say ‘I just can’t describe it’ or ‘That isn’t what I mean’.” Writing requires students to break through such dilemmas and put words to the panoply of their mental lives. When students lack the language necessary to voice that meaning — especially related to loss or grief — they risk a kind of existential oppression. Then

49 Slavoj Žižek’s maxim becomes dangerously real: “We ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”

But analysis of these themes can only take a student so far. Academic writing is all well and good, but something loud must be said for the indispensability of personal writing that is not merely autobiographical but creative as well. For some students, a standard(ized) English will not suffice to voice the pain and grief (to say nothing of the joy and euphoria) buried in the human heart. As James Baldwin said in 1979, the language of African people in America is “an alchemy that transformed ancient elements into a new language: A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey” (original emphasis). The brutal necessity of students’ lives can extend beyond a particular locus of reality, necessitating the innovation so common to young dialects but so forcefully disdained in classrooms across the country. If educators require a cipher for the cipher, so be it—but never doubt that linguistic innovation can (and should) be a skeleton key for linking the mind to the heart, the street to the library.

Therefore the courses I teach are uniquely suited to help students confront grief and pain.

The creation of original poetry and prose gives young people tools and permission to speak about loss as they must, whether it’s the white teenager who lost her cousin in Iraq; or the black teenager who lost his brother on the streets of Chicago. (And here the question of cursing in school must transcend banal platitudes, because in these moments of brutal necessity, it’s possible that no other goddamned word can do the job.)

My Creative Writing I students study excerpts from Eddie Stone’s biography of Donald ​ Goines Donald Writes No More, in which the lifelong felon discovered a rush of tranquility — ​

50 preceded by a deep sense of dread, putting his work into another man’s hands — when his cellmates lined up to read his only typewritten copy of his first book Whoreson. The students ​ ​ also hear Stephen King reflect on his experience in June 1999 when a careless driver nearly killed him with his van. They study the role of writing in helping King regain his mental health and sense of perspective. (Elsewhere they reflect on his use of writing to overcome alcoholism and drug addiction.) Then the students write poems about “The Most Difficult Thing I Have Ever

Done”.

My Creative Writing II students read Edwidge Danticat’s extraordinary essay “Women

Like Us” from her story collection Krik? Krak! (In Haiti, children seeking stories will ask the ​ ​ question “Krik?” and elders or other storytellers will respond “Krak!” in the call-and-response common throughout the African diaspora.) They are forced to consider how writing is more than casual scribbling in some places. They learn about the South African writer Steve Biko and the

Indonesian journalist Munir Said Thalib, both of whom died for daring to write dangerous truths.

I encourage my students to write letters for Amnesty International, and I share the story I heard from the American journalist Allan Nairn, about the Indonesian general who told him that one letter from outside the country would spare the life of a political prisoner. My students also write a mimetic reflection called “______Like Us”, in which they reflect on their existence between worlds, like the women writers in Danticat’s piece.

My Interdisciplinary Poetics students study excerpts from Michael Eric Dyson’s 2001 biography of Tupac Shakur, Holler If You Hear Me. They read the author’s interview with Leila ​ ​ Steinberg, who inherited the rapper’s immense library after he died. They chuckle with recognition when they read the quote from Shakur: “The way these kids study Shakespeare in

51 class now, they will study my work, too.” The students analyze his 1995 ode of love and respect,

“Dear Mama”, and reflect on his mother’s own autobiography, Evolution of a Revolutionary, ​ ​ written with the actor Jasmine Guy in 2004. Then they write lyrics of their own to capture the same spirit of reflection and gratitude.

My Creative Writing I students begin a unit on representing consciousness by writing about how they have changed in the past five years. They start with the surface elements of height, weight, and hair arrangements; but I force them to dig deeper and consider changes to their social, mental, emotional, spiritual, political, and academic lives. Eventually one student will describe how she's become more socially involved, after feeling forced into solitude during middle school. Another will explain how he's become more withdrawn as a consequence of his peers' immaturity. Recently one student described their experience as a person rejecting the gender binary, which led to a series of fascinating conversations about the singular "they" pronoun and balancing the need to avoid confusion for the reader while incorporating gender consciousness into the narrative.

Then each student takes the character s/he has created into a stream of consciousness, considering the empathic reflections of other individuals. Some students take great liberties with this assignment, using various fonts, colors, and styles in hand as they try to depict what Charlie

Meadows, in the 1991 film Barton Fink, calls "the life of the mind". One student printed half of ​ ​ her assignment upside-down to demonstrate her character's inverted thought patterns. Another wrote by hand in a jagged downward spiral to illustrate her character's Trent Reznor-esque broken mindset and the fragile ghosts in his head.

52 During a poetry unit I assign a piece about "Something I No Longer Have". I allow them to write about people they have lost, or something more lighthearted. This allows those young people in need of catharsis a safe space for deep reflection, while allowing others an alternative.

As a troubled teenager coping with the loss of my father, I remember needing days where I could goof off with my friends and make jokes about spatulas or silly walks. Fortunately writing can serve all of these variegated purposes, even in the same text. This can offer a deep sense of individualized learning, provided educators are willing to provide the time, space, and support needed to help students discover it.

Writing need not focus only on grief or pain; we do students no favors by fixating on the negative any more than we help them by assigning only Pollyanna. As Cornel West puts it: “Our courage rests on a deep democratic vision of a better world that lures us and a blood-drenched hope that sustains us.” Our project as educators must take seriously Helen Keller’s observation that “although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it”. We must not teach the Holocaust without teaching Treblinka. (A revolt which began by putting a stop to the suicides, since prisoners saw death as one thing over which they had any control.) No Cold War without the victory of East Timor. Frederick Douglass is doing a great job when he reminds us

“If there is no struggle there is no progress.” Sometimes those struggles are victorious.

Hip-hop was born of a victorious struggle against gang warfare. After Cornell “Black

Benjie” Benjamin was killed in 1971 during an attempt to stop a conflict between rival gangs in the Bronx, the Ghetto Brothers prepared to retaliate against the Black Spades and other gangs that had been involved. When they met with Benjamin’s mother, however, their bloodlust was shut down. “No revenge,” she told them. “Benjie lived for peace”.

53 Instead, they called together leaders from dozens of street gangs to work out a difficult and tenuous peace treaty. Determined to channel their energy into something creative, young people across the borough (and other parts of New York) threw house parties where hip-hop culture took shape. Soon MCs like Melle Mel and Run-DMC gave voice to the pain and grief in their communities with songs like “The Message” and “It’s Like That”. By connecting students back to these roots of honest exploration — rather than the dishonest exploitation so common to ​ ​ the mainstream hip-hop they’re used to — educators can help young people find alternative avenues for the rage burning inside.

When I invite students to select songs for our Daily Lyrical Analysis, they often bring texts into the classroom brimming with blueprints for bridges into the curriculum. One student selected Logic's 2014 song "Nikki", just as I was about to introduce the literary concept of a conceit. I got to play dumb and express confusion about figurative elements while the students explained to me how the extended metaphor worked in the lyrics. (“He’s talking about nicotine,

Mr. P,” one said, to which I replied: “Yeah, I know. Nikki, teen. Nikki is a teen girl. It’s just a love song, right?”)

Another student recently brought in Joyner Lucas' 2016 song "I'm Sorry", leading to a powerful discussion of loss, grief, and suicide. I suddenly had an urgent reason to take my students over the bridge into Hamlet's famous soliloquy. I told them about my friend Evan and my love for the writer David Foster Wallace. The students shared stories about friends they’ve lost (one through suicide, most in other ways), and wrote lyrics of elegy.

Responsibility and Rumination

54 When I give my students ten minutes (and a different topic) every day to write in their journals, there’s no rigid inspection of grammar or spelling. They don’t lose points if they use comma splices or split infinitives. Instead they are ordered to “burn through to first thoughts”, as

Natalie Goldberg says. And yet, when a student of mine was asked recently in college to reflect on a classroom experience that most improved his academic writing, he mentioned this journal practice. Paradoxical as it might seem to most educators, a strong link exists in many students between freedom and intellectual responsibility. This was solidified in my own academic praxis as a student at New College of Florida, where “Each student is responsible in the last analysis for his or her own education.”

Our nation’s fixation on test scores has the potential to drown important interrogations and introspections. Mr. Miyagi shows us the path of the true educator: Daniel meets no common core standards or ACT preparatory benchmarks. But when he faces a tough challenge, he has all the tools he needs. Carry the water and chop the wood, kids. Paint the fence and wax the car.

I work hard to make the formative journal writing as valuable — if not more so — as the summative assignments. I let them tell silly stories like those I wrote in middle school, but I encourage them to engage also in the deep metacognitive reflection that pushed me from being a mere student into a rigorous scholar in college. My goal is to make writing a regular (and enjoyable) practice, rather than a chore: something valuable for the truth and not just the money.

Writing then has the potential to become vital in unexpected moments of pain or grief.

Once while teaching in a rural Wisconsin school, my students took to writing like, well, as Shakespeare says, “as schoolboys from their books”. They resented the routine of Journal

Writing and often schemed, through bathroom breaks and other homework, to do the minimum

55 work possible. Justin was especially recalcitrant — he cracked jokes and goofed off in the hopes of distracting others and avoiding his writing.

Then one day Justin died in a car crash. Shocked and numb (this was my first student lost), I wrote on the board: “Write about what happened.” That day I didn’t need to keep anyone on task. They all wrote for the full ten minutes. I called time and someone said “Shut up. We want to keep writing.”

And so we did.

A version of this section was originally published as “Liberatory Grief: The One Truly Serious

Pedagogical Problem” in English Journal 107.2 (November 2017), pp. 66-71. Copyright 2018 by ​ ​ the National Council of Teachers of English. Used with permission.

Convince students they are valuable.

One last point I need to discuss here is the hip-hop crossover with which we began. In the song mentioned above, Mos Def says: “From my understanding, people get better when they start to understand that they are valuable. And they’re not valuable because they got a whole lot of money, or because somebody thinks they’re sexy.” He takes it in a religious direction, but my point is secular: Human beings are valuable because they have inherent worth. Every student is valuable because of her/his potential to contribute. Every student can love other people, and every student can accept love. (The ability to accept love is vastly undervalued in our society, but that’s a discussion for another time. bell hooks wrote a great book about it called On Love.) ​ ​

56 There are many ways for a person to be valuable. Too many teachers measure a student’s value solely through the lens of the academic curriculum, and assume that a student who doesn’t do well in school is either a failure or a pity case. Young people don’t want to be either of these things, but getting them to think of themselves as something else is a difficult task — especially if s/he’s constantly getting scores and grades that point down a negative path. It’s even more difficult if there are adults feeding the student horrible messages about being worthless, dumb, hopeless, etc. This does happen, and the worst consequence is that it seeps into the subconscious, ​ ​ to the point where the young person believes there’s no hope.

This is why hope must be on the agenda for every class, every day. Again, I’m not talking ​ ​ about some hippie-dippy drum circle feel-good lesson in banal meaninglessness. And I am not one of those people who believes we should never have any competitions because they damage the fragile egos of young people. But I do believe that we can (and should) encourage students, ​ ​ on a regular basis — every day, if possible — to love themselves, work hard, and believe in a future that’s better than what they’ve got right now.

The biggest problem we’ve got in the 21st century is a lack of will among some students to even imagine a better future. I have come to dread only one thing in my students: The interminable horror of what I call Blank America. Sometimes I find myself adrift in the backwash of this place: The America of Meh. Land of the bored and home of the whatever.

Some days are overshadowed by a few exchanges wherein one or two people express their desire to be forever invisible: “I dunno.” “I don't care.” “Leave me alone.” “I'm stupid.” “It doesn’t matter.” [silent shrugging and/or putting the head down] “I’m going to win the lottery / be a football star / become a viral sensation / marry rich / get famous somehow.” [staring at a cell

57 phone] “We’re all going to die soon anyway, so who cares?” “We can’t do anything to change the world, so why bother?”

Fortunately, with regard to this last comment, I’ve got a presentation about East Timor that decimates that falsehood. I know for a fact that we can change things for the better, and I ​ ​ make sure the kids know it. But those other responses are harder to address.

Paulo Freire stressed the need for dialogue. He insisted that educators work with students ​ ​ to proceed together toward an ontology of developing humanity. But what do you do when the student not only refuses to engage in dialogue, but insists that neither you nor he will gain in any way from it? How can the educator overlay experience with perspective to produce a combined narrative of purpose when the student refuses to accept that any of his experience is worthwhile?

I don't have trouble working with the hardcore gangsta-types, or the students with learning disorders or what have you. But when I come face to face with the existential horrors of a society which convinces its young that they don't matter — that they might not even exist, for it's just as well that they don't — my mind reels with infinite dread.

Sure, I'm only dealing with a handful of people here. And as common as the cell-phone zombification process is becoming, I don't think this problem is indicative of the Future of Our

Society or anything. But the possibility crushes me. I am an empathetic person: I always and immediately imagine myself in the souls of others. And my flesh cracks when I position myself in such a mind, drained of imagination and dulled to only the most abject of impulses.

Never mind about how such a soul fares on the standardized test. What about the much more important cost of living an existence without meaning? My inclination is to shrink away, to say “Well, that’s too bad, but ultimately it’s up to him.” And, of course, it is. But how can I sleep

58 with the notion of my own reticence? Isn’t this hesitation at the core of our civilization’s woes?

Isn’t the struggle about some sort of awakening? How do you convince someone in The Matrix to take the red pill?

The point is that we have no choice. If you see someone about to jump off a bridge, you’d try to talk them down, right? Could you live with yourself if you didn’t even try? Well, I try every day. And sometimes I succeed, which is annoying, because my life would be easier if I could just give up. If I could go in and just focus on split infinitives and what a zeugma is, I would probably have less stress and turmoil in my brain.

Worst of all, I’ve had students tell me that I’ve served as a kind of Mr. Bergstrom.

(“What did he teach you?” Ms. Hoover asks in The Simpsons Episode 7F19, to which Lisa ​ ​ replies: “That life is worth living!”) Never in those terms, of course, but close to it. And when one student tells you that you’ve shattered a barrier, well, you can never stop trying to shatter them all.

Right?

59 3. Obey the Ten Commandments of Teaching.

“Why is it that in most children education seems to destroy the creative urge? Why do so many boys and girls leave school with blunted perceptions and a closed mind? A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.”

Aldous Huxley The Paris Review (1960) ​

The classroom is a supremely contextual place. One size does not fit all, and different ​ ​ students respond differently to different styles of classroom management. Just because I’ve been successful with Journal Writing and discussing East Timor does not guarantee that other teachers will use these tools with as much success.

Still, I’ve settled on a few hard and fast rules — commandments, if you will — that every educator should obey. I feel strongly about these, even though only the Sith think in absolutes. @ me and let’s fight.

1. Thou shalt never call students “stupid” or tell them to “shut up”.

We’re supposed to be building kids up, not tearing them down. Insults and disrespectful words have a dreadful power when they come from a teacher. Despite its ubiquity, there’s something uniquely disrespectful about the phrase “shut up”. Train yourself to speak with more nuance and compassion.

These things are often excused as “just joking” or lighthearted attempts to poke fun. But as they say, there’s a little truth in every joke. The more you call kids “stupid” or tell them to

“shut up”, especially if you never — or rarely — stop to provide earnest, heartfelt messages of

60 genuine love and support, the more students will think you mean it. Your mask of supposedly humorous scorn and derision will become your true face to the students, especially if you never remove it. (Trust me, I know. Learn from my mistakes.) For the same reasons, I urge teachers not to call students horrible names, even in private. The most difficult students are the ones who most need our compassion and respect.

We teachers have to vent; please don’t think I’m trying to take that away. But how we ​ ​ vent is as important as when and where we vent. (As Hopha says in the 1998 movie Slam: “We ​ ​ come in fightin, we gonn’ go out fighting. But how we fight is the fight.”) Our thoughts affect ​ ​ our words, and vice versa. The more anger and hostility you allow yourself to feel (or, more accurately, absorb) from that difficult child in your classroom, the more nastiness you’re going to project onto future interactions with other students.

Remember: The hardest thing about dealing with nasty people is not letting them turn you into one of them. There’s a fine line between demanding respect and meeting hostility with hostility. As much as possible, your job as a teacher is to help students transform their hostility into decency and compassion. This can only be achieved by being the decent, compassionate presence you want to see.

2. Thou shalt forgive.

Young people make mistakes — sometimes big, dumb mistakes. You made bad decisions when you were younger, and you (presumably) don’t want your entire being judged by those dumb choices. Of course I’m not arguing for the abolition of consequences, or making yourself a doormat. Quite the opposite; having clear behavior guidelines and carrying out logical

61 consequences is a necessity for every good teacher. But the best habit I’ve been able to cultivate in my teacher-self is to forgive kids for the little blunders they make: trying to start power struggles, the occasional non-directive bad word, sulking, sloppy attitudes.

The 17th century zen master Bankei Yōtaku said: “The true human ideal is to show kindness to those who are foolish and help those who are evil.” (He said and did many other things of interest to educators as well. Paul Reps’ 1957 collection Zen Flesh, Zen Bones has ​ ​ several Bankei stories every teacher should read.)

Forgiveness is one of the great misunderstood phenomena of our time. Far from being a floppy kind of permissiveness or forgetting, forgiveness is a revolutionary tool of transformative power. Eva Mozes Kor was a child when she and her twin sister Miriam were taken to

Auschwitz. Her family was killed, and she was subjected to hideous experiments at the hands of

Josef Mengele. Fifty years later, she returned to Auschwitz and declared her forgiveness for the

Nazis. Afterward, she said: “I felt a burden of pain was lifted from me. I was no longer in the grip of pain and hate.” Her story is captured in the documentary film Forgiving Dr. Mengele. ​ ​ Refusal (or inability) to forgive allows our anger to fester and ferment, and it’s only a matter of time before that anger explodes at the wrong person. It’s difficult for a teacher to endure a major frustration during second hour and wipe the slate clean before third hour begins.

(Sometimes it’s impossible.) But that should be the goal — to cleanse ourselves of the irritations and aggravations draped over us every day. Forgiveness is the path toward this goal.

For more discussion about forgiveness, I strongly recommend two books: One is

Forgiving the Dead Man Walking by Debbie Morris, who was abducted and raped by Robert ​ Willie, the basis for Sean Penn’s character in the movie Dead Man Walking. The other is Amish ​ ​ ​

62 Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy by Donald B. Kraybill et al, about the 2006 ​ school shooting in the Amish community of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania.

If these people — after enduring such suffering and agony — can find ways to forgive those who wronged them, how can we teachers refuse to forgive students who give us a hard time?

3. Thou shalt resist anger’s tendency to take control.

When a student is deliberately trying to make you angry, doesn’t s/he win when you get mad? As noted, I’ve trained myself to let out a breath and spout a line from The Usual Suspects ​ in these instances. If you find a quick and safe release, you can save yourself (and your students) from a lot of pointless bickering — or worse. Woe betide the poor teachers who let students push their buttons, and find themselves talked into a corner from which they cannot back down.

This is an incredibly difficult commandment to obey, especially for me. In moments like this we’re filled with a mixture of irritation, concern, and aggravation, usually alongside the usual fatigue. Panic can even appear if we’re worried that we’re losing control of the classroom.

It’s much better for everyone involved (yourself included) if you transform your anger into compassion or action. Don’t send kids on guilt trips, but neither should you give them the satisfaction of seeing you get bent out of shape. Just tell them how sad or angry you feel, remind them of the positive path you want and expect them to choose, and move on. I often invoke the spirits of our ancestors, who struggled and sacrificed so that young people can spend their time going to school, instead of having to work, as many kids have had to do for centuries — and which many kids still must do, even today.

63 The absurd irony here is that some students occasionally need someone to yell at them, in ​ ​ order to move past their negative habits. One of the most important experiences I ever had as a student was getting scolded loudly by my journalism teacher. It was exactly what I needed to hear. I described the situation with “Betty” in Chapter 1, and I’ve had many other students in exactly the same boat, wherein raw anger seems like the only path that will yield results. Of course such things must be done carefully, rarely, and with ample side orders of love and respect

— otherwise the student is likely to close up and shut down. But sometimes the truth is unpleasant, and sometimes the student needs to hear: “Quit whining and do your work.”

The other absurd irony is that some students — usually those who come from angry and/or violent homes — will think you don’t care about them if you never get angry. They may not trust people who are always calm and composed. (I never have this problem, heh.) If you are always relaxed and rational, they may suspect that you’re less concerned about their future than you are your paycheck or the dismissal bell. They say that the students don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care. Fortunately, there are many different ways to show you care, but sadly some kids equate emotion (even negative emotion) with concern. As always, balance is the key.

4. Thou shalt make your classroom a haven.

The world is a scary, cold, hostile place, especially for adolescents. Not only must you remain vigilant against abuse, bullying, and harassment, you should help your students find realistic, conscious ways to redirect their tension. I don’t allow students to tell each other to “shut up”; I insist that they find some other phrase with less disrespect. This usually results in a brief

64 contest to see who can find the most amusing alternative, like “hush your mouth” or “pipe down”.

At the risk of being repetitive, I will point out that the teacher sets the tone. If you lead by example, and treat everyone with respect, the students are much more likely to do the same.

(This is not a guarantee, of course.)

This commandment can be tough to reconcile with the climate of pressure created by grades and test scores. The more emphasis we put on those test scores — as we have, steadily, over the last 20 years — the more difficult it is for our classrooms to be safe places. If you tell a kid that you love and respect him, but then give him a report card with “FAILURE” on it, how is that not a terrible contradiction and betrayal? Do we really expect the kid to think: “I know my teacher is merely providing an objective evaluation of the quality of my work, not passing judgment on my worth as a person”?

The truth is that students do conflate their sense of academic achievement with their ​ ​ sense of worth. How could they not? We basically demand this of them. The paradox, therefore, is how to encourage a child who is failing the class? And, even more difficult: How do we convince students who have failed often in the past to work hard now?

Another element of making your classroom a haven is the need for clarity. Young people are surrounded by confusion, uncertainty, and chaos; you don’t want to add to that. Give clear directions, and make sure that every assignment has clear criteria (preferably in writing) on how it will be graded. (I hate trying to help a student from another class and seeing vague directions on the assignment sheet.) Being clear will also help you grade fairly, since you will only be taking off points for what the student did not do. And please don’t be one of those teachers who ​ ​

65 refuses to give perfect scores. No, students aren’t perfect — but they can complete assignments perfectly.

5. Thou shalt avoid hypocrisy.

If you order your students to be silent (as I do) during the first ten minutes of class while writing in their journals, then you must also be silent. If you forbid students from eating or ​ ​ drinking during class, then what gives you the right to drink coffee or eat a cookie?

Naturally this cannot be an absolute thing — if I need to ask a student a question at the start of class, talking quietly may be unavoidable. But I will go to where the student is, so that I can whisper. This can be onerous, especially at the end of the day when I’m exhausted, and it would be so much easier to just talk across the room. But if it’s important that the room be quiet so the kids can concentrate, then I need to be quiet. Sometimes I’ll write the question down to avoid speaking. (I keep a few cards in my shirt pocket that say common things like “Write!” and

“SHHH!” so I can silently motivate them to keep working.)

I also recognize and appreciate that teachers deserve a few perks that students don’t enjoy. But the more you develop and justify a two-tiered system of classroom justice, the more resentful the students will be — and the more they will struggle for power, especially in silly, meaningless ways.

In a macrocosmic sense, there is the rest of the building to consider. If you tell the students not to curse in your classroom, but then you use foul language, then you cultivate the idea (which plenty of students already have) that the rules and their purpose don’t really matter.

Young people are quick to absorb these violations — we’ve seen recent examples in the movie

66 Boyhood and the TV show Mad Men. Your classroom is no different; whether you realize it or ​ ​ ​ not, those students are willing to follow your lead. (Not all of them, of course, but you’ll be surprised.)

6. Thou shalt listen to your students.

Really listen; don’t just daydream while you wait for them to finish. I take my students seriously, even — especially — when I suspect their comments are ignorant, or poorly thought-out, or intended to be dismissed as mere comedy. They quickly realize that I’m paying attention to them, even if what they say is quiet or clandestine. As I tell them: “If you’re talking in this room, you’re talking to me.” Consequently, they tend to choose their words with care.

Unfortunately, this also intimidates some students, especially if they worry that I might cross-examine their assumptions, or poke fun at their attitudes. But I am not one of those ​ ​ teachers who tells the kids that they can say whatever they like. After all, blatant white supremacy should not be allowed in the classroom, should it? The question is: Why not? Because it is ignorant and unable to withstand intelligent, conscious scrutiny. I insist that any statement or opinion (including those I make) be capable of enduring such scrutiny. Otherwise, students learn nothing about the value of independent thought or open-minded analysis.

In fact, I enjoy those instances when students say foolish or ignorant things, because it gives me a chance to dissect the attitudes behind them and expose the misguided thought for everyone (including myself) to reconsider. I encourage the students to ask me questions about my own views as well, and I insist that they not agree blindly with whatever I say. I once read ​ ​ about a clever teacher who gave a lecture on a bogus historical event, which he expected the

67 students to debunk with thirty seconds of Google searching. When they didn’t, he docked them points for mindless obedience.

The teacher is not an omniscient font of knowledge, wisdom, and insight. The student is ​ ​ not a vessel to be filled with facts or bluster from the person in the big desk. And it is not okay ​ ​ ​ for students to ignore what’s being said around them, even — especially — if they disagree.

One of the most urgent problems in American democracy is our inability to discuss things in a civil way with people of different perspectives. But some of our most important discussions are with those who see the world in different ways. And despite the rancor and acid that surrounds so much of our political discourse these days, such civility is not impossible. In 2009, ​ ​ former US Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge went on The Rachel Maddow Show to ​ ​ discuss government policy. She pulled no punches and demanded the truth at every turn, but they had a respectful conversation. When they finished, he said: “I really appreciate the civil way we’ve had the discussion. Frankly, I think we would advance our interests as a country a lot further and a lot faster if we could have discussions such as this. And I thank you.”

This sort of dialectic is healthy and productive. Speaking of which…

7. Thou shalt engage students in dialectic conversation, rather than debate.

Debate seeks to name winners and losers. Dialectic seeks to benefit all parties though the respectful evaluation of (and building on) ideas. Debate encourages willful ignorance and exclusion of facts or ideas that do not advance an individual’s argument. Dialectic relishes such facts and ideas, because they help to elevate the conversation to its next level.

68 If you’re willing to debate a student, you probably know more about the subject than the student does. You’re likely to respond in a way that seeks to prove her/him wrong. The student may concede that you’re right, but more likely s/he will simply retreat for a while — probably feeling resentful — and try to find some way to retaliate in the future. Intellectual exploration is reduced to just another power struggle.

And imagine if you lose the debate! (Perhaps you’ve already had this frightening ​ ​ experience.) You’ve gambled away some of your stature, and there’s a good chance some students have lost some respect for you.

If, on the other hand, you insist on dialectic conversation, then everyone wins. Each side builds on the other side’s points in order to find a constantly evolving synthesis. You leave behind power struggles, ego (hopefully, at least a little), and the possibility of making other people (or yourself) look/feel bad.

No one loses in a dialectic conversation. Instead, we say things like: “Well, I agree with you about X, but what about Q?” It’s no coincidence that Grace Lee Boggs (quoted at the start of

Chapter 2) believed strongly in the power of dialectical analysis to help us “grow our souls”. The dialectic is never locked into just one proposal or dichotomy. Sometimes the best thing we can do in a dialectic conversation is to expand the discussion beyond the initial starting point.

The basic nature of a dialectic discussion works like this: One side presents a thesis, and the other side responds with an antithesis. This is not meant to bash or humiliate the other side, but merely challenge it. Then both sides work to find common ground and combine both perspectives into a synthesis. As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote about economics in his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here?: “Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism ​ ​

69 forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.”

Once a synthesis has been formulated, further analysis can take place if one side wants to challenge it; the first synthesis becomes a new thesis, and another round can begin. This is how we can elevate and evolve our discussions, rather than (as usually happens with debate) squabbling endlessly about one tier of the issue without ever moving forward.

Here’s how a dialectic conversation might go down in my classroom: Many students prefer the cartoon show Family Guy over my favorite TV show, The Simpsons. After we engage ​ ​ ​ ​ in some humorous hyperbolic outrage, I say: “Look, if you find Family Guy funnier, that’s fine. ​ ​ That’s just a matter of aesthetic taste, and there’s no way to measure such a thing. It’s like preferring french fries over onion rings. There’s nothing to measure. I like the humor of The ​ Simpsons, but I’m not hurt if it’s not your cup of tea.” ​ Then I add: “However, we can measure the sophistication of the social satire in each ​ ​ show. and you must concede that The Simpsons does a better job satirizing — in an intelligent, ​ ​ conscious way — the institutions of family, work, school, church, law, government, marriage, and business. Meanwhile, Family Guy is mostly concerned with …” I give them my best Peter ​ ​ Griffin voice: “Euhhh, Lois! I got my foot stuck inna toilet again.” Pause for laughter. “Right?”

That final question is really important, for two reasons. First, it gives the other person a chance to agree with me and concede a point, if they wish. (It’s always good for us to admit when other people are right, especially if the other person is me.) Second, however, is much more central to the nature of the dialectic: It allows them to refute my thesis, or provide an

70 antithesis that might allow us to find a higher synthesis. Some students have offered examples of social satire on Family Guy, and I have enjoyed them. (“Rumsfeld!”) Consequently, the dialectic ​ ​ has not belittled anyone for their preferences; it has clarified a vital distinction in the conversation; and it has helped me to appreciate an element of “the other side” that I had not appreciated before. Hopefully, the same is true for the students as well.

An excellent example of this was recently offered by the comedian Hari Kondabolu. In

2017 he released a documentary film called The Problem with Apu. In it, he explores the racial ​ ​ dynamics of the Kwik-E-Mart owner on The Simpsons, a show he has always loved. By ​ ​ challenging this problematic character, he injected a much-needed next-level dialectic element into our understanding of the show’s social impact. Sadly, Simpsons creator Matt Groening ​ ​ offered a retrograde reaction: “it’s a time in our culture where people love to pretend they’re offended”. On the other hand, Hank Azaria, who has voiced Apu for decades, called for more diverse writing staffs, and said: “I think the most important thing is to listen to Indian people and their experience with it … I’m perfectly willing to step aside. It just feels like the right thing to do to me.”

Even when a dialectic falls flat and produces no evidence of enlightenment, its tenets offer and encourage everyone involved to keep chewing on the discussion. We understand our own constantly-evolving natures, and seeds might only bear fruit days (or weeks, or months, or years) later. The more open our discussions are, the more likely those seeds are to blossom.

Dialectic helps everyone involved grow and evolve, which really should be the goal of all parties in a quality classroom. By checking your ego at the door, you can benefit while helping your students refine their conversational technique as well.

71

8. Thou shalt be unafraid to look human.

Many teachers refuse to admit when they’re wrong. Usually this is done because of pride or blind certainty, or because the teacher wishes to maintain a firm grip on the power dynamic.

Unfortunately, it usually makes the teacher look silly and insecure on top of being wrong. When a student announces that I’ve spelled pneumonia incorrectly, I will respond with a loud indignant ​ ​ “No I didn’t.” But when the second student insists that my spelling is wrong, I’ll immediately ask with a goofy: “Did I really spell it wrong?” I’ll check my spelling, and (if necessary) consult a dictionary. If I’m wrong, I’ll admit it and thank the student for her/his vigilance. Away with the pompous insistence that the teacher is always right! What does that tell the students about the necessity for them to admit their mistakes? ​ ​ ​ ​ Students laugh when someone points out a typo on an assignment, but it’s best to just roll with it. Often I’ll smile and say “Well done. Good eye, Maria.” Or — even better — I’ll find the typo first, and apologize for the error as I pass out the papers, and make fun of myself while I’m at it. Jovial self-mockery is a teacher’s best weapon. Just be careful not to overdo it, or you’ll enter the realm of desperation.

This also applies to the realm of human emotion. Many teachers overdo this, drowning their classes in banal minutiae of their personal lives. But it’s also easy for us to crush our humanity in the name of “professionalism”. This can create a gulf between teacher and students that need not exist; indeed, letting the kids “see behind the curtain”, as it were, can help them to make sense of how their own swings of mood and mindset can relate to their own work.

72 Suppose a teacher says (as I sometimes do): “Sorry for my sluggishness today, folks. I’m not feeling well. But we’ve got a job to do, so let’s do it.” This gives the students a schema for situating their own circumstance or attitude, rather than always defaulting to “I don’t feel well, so I’m just gonna put my head down.” I also like to spit this quote from Squire Bill Widener, often misattributed to Theodore Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”

9. Thou shalt strive to be a master of your subject.

In The Simpsons Episode EABF07, “I’m Spelling As Fast As I Can” (Season 14), Marge ​ ​ offers to teach piano lessons. When Lisa reminds her that she doesn’t play the piano, Marge replies: “I just need to stay one lesson ahead of the kid.” Every teacher feels like this once in a while, but it’s a good idea to avoid this mentality.

The number one thing students expect from their teachers is abundant expertise in the subject matter at hand. For this reason I’m glad that my lifelong love affair with writing helps me help other people do it better. Writing Wikipedia articles about Honoré de Balzac and Chinua

Achebe has helped me be a better teacher of literature. Not only does it remind me of the arduous

(though vital) nature of research, but it also helps me contextualize various literary epochs, situate artistic movements, and broaden my base of knowledge to reflect back on texts that we read in class. A nice fringe benefit is that it puts me back in the shoes of a learner, which allows me to refresh my intellectual empathy circuits. For a superb essay on this phenomenon, look up an article called “What I learned as the worst student in the class” by Adrianne Wadewitz, my late great Wikipedia mentor.

73 I’ve worked hard to become an intelligent person in general, and I believe all teachers should strive constantly to gain more knowledge and insight. Here we encounter another absurd irony, which many students can also appreciate: You will spend years and years developing a varied, profuse vocabulary, only to hear angry complaints from people that you use too many big words. Still, as the rap duo Channel Live says: “I reveal the deal so I’m something like a revelator / If it’s over your head get your [behind] on the elevator.”

I always admit a gap in my knowledge, even when it’s something that I ought to know about an author or related topic. When possible, I’ll look the thing up on the spot so I can educate both the students and myself. When there’s no time, I’ll find the answer as soon as I can.

(Write yourself a note! You will forget.) ​ ​ One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a teacher is to pretend to know something, and give some vague pompous answer. Some teachers project an extreme confidence despite not actually knowing the thing; this is a sure path to folly. You will at some point lead someone in the wrong direction, and you need to be able to back up and set them straight. Of course students shouldn’t blindly believe everything you say, but neither should you feign omniscience. (I like to remind the students of this same dictum, and wait for someone to ask what omniscience means.) ​ ​ It surprises me when I know more about another teacher’s subject, because I put such a high premium on knowing my stuff. Of course lots of people know lots of different parts of a subject, so it’s not really a contest. But many teachers content themselves with the mere curriculum for which they are responsible, and then stop. We should resist this mindset, for two reasons.

74 First, it feeds the sick stereotype that “Those who can, do; those who cannot, teach.” If we only know what’s in the syllabus, then anyone really can do our job. It won’t be long before ​ ​ robots and AI systems are being promoted as the low-cost solution for cash-strapped school districts; dynamic multivariate thinking is at the core of real human education.

Secondly, an expansive understanding of your subject allows you to provide comprehensive information and answers, rather than just simple bits of data or skillsets. Good teachers demonstrate the power of making connections parts of the world that seem isolated.

After all, teenagers might not ask “why” very much, but you can be sure they are thinking it. ​ ​ When we English teachers can explain a more holistic understanding of literary canons, artistic movements, critical perspectives, and links to history, we provide a great service to the students.

The same is obviously true for teachers of science, health, and world languages. I assume it’s true about math as well, but to be honest I’m not sure.

10. Thou shalt not lie to students, or break your promises.

I don’t make many promises to my students. Instead I use those convenient equivocations that I hated as a youth: “We’ll see” and “I’ll do my best.” When I do promise something, I write it down and make sure I don’t fail. This has led me into some crummy situations, where I’m terribly ill but grading papers anyway, lest I default on a promise made to my students. I’ve since switched over to: “If everything goes to plan, I should have your essays back on Monday.” I find that students are much less bothered by wishy-washy assurances than they are by broken promises. Holden Caulfield was pissed off at phonies, not adults who refused to commit to things.

75 We live in a time when most people see honor as a silly afterthought or encumbrance, but it’s important to me. Like Ron Swanson on the show Parks & Recreation, I try to live every day ​ ​ in accordance with my own moral code, making decisions carefully and intentionally. Of course it’s easy to take this too far, and find ourselves paralyzed by an inability to live exactly as we should. (I’m a vegetarian, for example, but I have a weakness for seafood. Technically I should call myself a “pescatarian”, but that word feels annoying and pretentious to me.) Still, there’s an important difference between saying “This thing is wrong, but I’m doing it anyway” and “This thing isn’t wrong, because I feel like doing it.”

Besides, building trust in the classroom is critical, and students are adept at identifying dishonest activity and truth-bending. More to the point, some students — it seems like the percentage is growing, but who knows — are surrounded by adults who cannot be trusted.

Proving that you can be trusted is no small matter. As I tell the students, this always starts small: ​ ​ I see you down the hall talking to friends, and then when you’re ten seconds late, you claim you had to use the bathroom — no big deal, really. But I know you’re willing to lie to me. Why, then, should I believe you later on, when it’s a more important situation and I don’t have any evidence one way or another? The same is obviously true for teachers.

I also let students know that certain areas are off limits, and I get to keep some things private. I don’t discuss my marriage very often, for example. I’m not embarrassed; it’s just none of their business. I will discuss my own adolescent follies and foibles, because I like to show them (especially the ones who are awkward or socially incoherent, as I was) how I overcame those struggles. But some spots are too tender for public consumption, and I let them know.

Students generally prefer to see where the boundaries are, rather than receive bogus answers.

76 Students are more likely to fess up if they believe that honesty is respected in your classroom. If the kids know you’re seeking truth, they’re more likely to provide it.

These commandments are not silver bullets, and heaven knows I’m guilty of breaking them from time to time. One final piece of advice is to forgive yourself, especially if you’re a new teacher. You will make mistakes, and you will get angry at yourself. While it’s healthy to ​ ​ learn from your blunders and make things right when you can, it is not healthy to beat yourself ​ ​ up or make things worse by dwelling on the past.

77 4. You must take care of yourself.

“To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson “Friendship” (1883)

Teaching is an incredibly stressful job. Psychology Today reports that 40% of teachers in ​ ​ the US burn out within five years. We need good teachers to stick around, but no one is going to take care of us. We have to take care of ourselves. This can be tough, because many of us approach the job with some form of martyr’s complex. School boards and district officials understand this, and have leverage as a result that other professions don’t include. Put another way: We teach because we care, and it’s easy to exploit that passion. We put up with a lot.

Still, I love teaching, and after 15 years I’ve more or less conquered all of my professional fears. My love for the students has grown to the point where it has erased any intimidation I once felt. It can be scary to stand in front of 25 teenagers and push them toward enlightenment. It can be discouraging when they hate something you love, or — even worse — ignore it. I still get butterflies in my stomach on the first day of every semester, and there’s a constant dread of not reaching the kids.

But I’ve come to realize that loving the students is the only way to respond to all of this.

If Nelson Mandela and Harvey Milk and Dorothy Day have taught us anything, it’s that love is the supreme redemptive power of humanity. And even if you can’t reach that one difficult kid, responding with love and compassion can at least avoid making things worse. And it will avoid

78 making you into a difficult person, which is vital for all the other students who are paying ​ ​ attention to what you say and do.

Over the years, I’ve encountered all the various flavors of student facade and dysfunction, and I’ve learned how to recognize the psychic armor people wear, and why. I’m still surprised by students, in good and bad ways. I might get bored if the kids never surprised me, but then I’ve got a higher tolerance for repetition than most people. Best of all, I feel an authentic honesty when I start every semester with “This is going to be a great class!” Even when the bad ​ ​ times show up (and they always do, sooner or later), I know they’re temporary, and the good times will soon return.

The one thing I’m not good at is returning papers quickly. Grading papers takes me a ​ ​ long time, because I refuse to provide mediocre or superficial comments. When I began teaching, ​ a student told me about her favorite teacher, a superb woman named Ms. Williams. “When I get a paper back from Ms. Williams,” the student said, “I know she’s read it carefully and taken my writing seriously.” And I thought: Yes! That’s exactly what good teacher feedback should feel ​ like.

I’m fortunate to be friends with Ms. Williams, who — for various reasons — left the teaching profession. When I told her this story, she smiled and said: “Yeah, but look at where that got me.” She just couldn’t make it work. Nevertheless, I’m committed to finding the middle-way balance between giving thorough, comprehensive feedback and remaining sane.

(Smaller classes would make this easier. If our school had made that a priority, perhaps we would not have lost Ms. Williams.)

79 I don’t use the phrase “remaining sane” lightly. I believe it’s vital for teachers to relax and unwind on a regular basis, whether through zen meditation, or video games, or gardening, or reading fun books, or going for walks, or shooting clay pigeons, or whatever works. Like no other job I’ve had — and none that I know about — teaching requires an incredible investment of mental and psychic energy. Beyond the neverending paperwork, email, bureaucracy, material acquisition, photocopying, parental contact, meetings, professional development activities, and classroom maintenance, there are 30 young minds demanding your attention and relying on you to help them make sense of the noise and chaos outside the school.

I take that responsibility seriously, and the hyperactivity of what I like to call my indefatigable neural system manifests in the classroom as a barrage of intellectual energy, in service to the eager minds who need my help. In return, I claim my right in the evenings and on the weekend (when possible) — and during the glorious months of summer — to decompress, debrief, de-stress, and decelerate. (UDHR Article 24, remember?) I believe there is an epidemic of insomnia among classroom teachers; I certainly suffer from it myself. Despite the venomous rhetoric from “reformers” about how horrible and inefficient teachers are, we have a responsibility, and a right, to take care of ourselves.

I don’t know how some people leave school and deal with more kids at home. My mother did it, and considering how obnoxious I was at times, that alone qualifies her for sainthood. I barely have any attention or patience left after 3:30, and when my students ask me how my wife puts up with me, I can only answer with complete honesty: “I have no idea.” (This is one reason why I’m different from many video gamers — in my free time I don’t want some insane, convoluted challenge. I want something fun but stress-free. I wage boss fights every day against

80 the abstract enemies of ignorance, apathy, and distraction. I don’t need more aggravation when I get home.)

Nevertheless, I feel extremely fortunate to be a teacher. Being entrusted with young minds is an honor, and I’m humbled to hear from so many students who thank me for doing a decent job. I hope I am able to shape others as I was shaped, with the tools necessary to conquer not only the annoying pests of adolescent insecurity, but also the demons of self-doubt, the ogres of anxiety, and the monsters of fear. Together we’ll make it through this scary interlude of history and create a better world for ourselves and everyone who comes after us.

One last thing, before I get to the more specific ruminations on staying healthy while teaching: In The Breakfast Club — a superb film about American teenage life, limited though it ​ ​ is to white suburban kids — the teacher Mr. Vernon talks with the custodian Carl about the kids.

“I've been teaching for twenty-two years,” Vernon says, “and each year these kids get more and more arrogant.” Carl responds with a bad word, then says: “Come on Vern, the kids haven't changed; you have.” ​ ​ This is a deep moment, which merits serious reflection. I’ve thought about it a lot during my 18 years in the classroom, and I’m still not sure what I think. While I often feel distant from the cellphone addiction and musical tastes, I still find important connections and similarities across the ages. We tend to idealize ourselves, our experience, and the “good old days”, so it’s natural to think that young people in the 21st century are a world apart.

But they’re not. Their tools are different, and the social world in which they live

(especially online) is different. But in the final analysis, the kids are not so different from us. We

81 need to keep this in mind, so that we stay open and compassionate — as well as firm and resolute.

Once again it becomes a matter of love. If you find yourself scared by the differences between yourself and the students, you’ll respond with timidity, passivity, and fear; or worse, illogical rigidity and brute force, in the form of meaningless power struggles. But if you stay open to the deep connections that exist between you and them, you can fine tune that unique relationship into something more honest and valuable — for you and the students. ​ ​

Manage your time and your stress.

The zen tradition emphasizes the urgency of now. Be here, in this moment. Experience ​ ​ your breath. Listen to the world around you. Do what you are doing, and only that. Chop wood, ​ ​ carry water. As Thich Nhat Hanh says: “Breathe. You are alive.”

As a teacher, though, time is my best friend and my worst enemy. Every second between bells becomes more precious than air; and the more I value this time, the more important my free time becomes for freedom. Of course, this mindset clashes with the ways teachers must dwell on the future and the past: (a) planning for future classes and (b) grading papers from the past.

With regard to (a), I do okay. I've never taught a class for which I was utterly unprepared, but some teachers spend much more time preparing than I do. Maybe it’s the thrill of on-stage improvisation. I enjoy having resources ready for explaining concepts or demonstrating techniques; there are few thrills more euphoric than discovering a presentation I’d forgotten I’d made. But there’s also something to be said for just diving into a classroom experience without a

82 life vest. I think some of the tedium and dreariness of the classroom — for students and teachers

— is caused by over-preparation to the point of robotic automation.

As for (b), when it comes to the mistakes of the past, I get like Lady Macbeth: “Things without all remedy should be without regard.” I know the research says that timely feedback is important, but then I wonder: Why are we bringing up old stuff? Why spend so much time on the past? Especially when the main purpose seems to be the attachment of a letter or number, for the needs of bookkeepers and admissions boards? This is hyperbole, of course; students need to get feedback on their written work. But there is a grain of sincerity here.

It’s a cliché of education that we work hard to write comments, only to watch the students fling those comments, unread, into the garbage. But I don’t share this view. Most kids realize how much time and effort I put into my comments. Whatever the reason, my students tend to look at my feedback as soon as I hand papers back, and not just for the grade. This is flattering, and of course it means that I can’t give up on leaving lots of comments. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons for the ubiquity of the belief that students ignore our comments — if we’re convinced the kids don’t care, then we don’t have to leave comments at all! (This is harder to ascertain with all the work moving online, but the number of students who respond to my feedback is significant.)

I always feel time slipping away like the grains of sand in the 10-minute hourglass I use ​ ​ for Journal Writing. I wake up every day at 6:00 AM or earlier, even during winter and summer ​ ​ holidays. In the evenings I savor with great trepidation the few precious hours I have after school. After the clubs and my political activism work is done, I wash dishes, walk the dog, and spend time with my wife. Then I have to choose between video games, exercise, meditation, and

83 reading. (Video games usually win this debate.) If I’m lucky I can squeeze in two of these.

Writing has to wait until the weekend (although most Sundays are filled with paper-grading), or

— more often — vacation.

Using my “free” time is a careful balancing act. If I read or meditate, I might get sleepy and then I might miss out on maximum excitement. If I play a challenging video game, I might get frustrated and then perhaps I’ll go to bed angry. If I exercise or meditate, I might feel afterwards like I’ve not had as much fun as I deserve. Of course the real secret is to let go of all these anxieties, but the intense demands on my time at school play an enormous role.

Some school days are longer than others, of course, but most of my days pass in the blink of an eye. I’m always shocked at how little time I have left in class. As soon as I realize I need to use the bathroom during a planning period, I remember the copies I need to make first, and then the bell rings. I like to greet my students as they enter the room, so it’s important for me to finish these preparatory matters in my “free” time outside of classes.

The other urgent time element is related to class size. As a superb teacher, I can tell you that I can be a lot more superb when I don’t have every desk in my class of 30 filled to capacity. ​ ​ I like to meet constantly with every student, hear from every student every day, and give feedback to every student on a regular basis. These things take time, and the more students I have on my rosters, the less time I have to offer them.

Someone recently asked me online why teaching is stressful. My response: “I cannot even begin to answer that question because I am so totally exhausted from teaching.” It is one of the most stressful jobs on the planet.

84 In addition to pouty, arrogant, disinterested students (whose passion for learning — or at least passing standardized tests — you must excite, lest you be accused of ineptitude), you will face endless bureaucratic mandates; mountains of tedious paperwork, some related to student activities and some not; gallons of email, most of it barely important enough to get you into big trouble if you ignore it; years of “professional development” which often translates into mind-numbing seminars or lectures at best; meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting ​ ​ after meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting; conferences with/about young people who brag about how they hate you, your class, the curriculum, and everyone in the building, and refuse to do work, but still deserve to pass the class; and a socio-political environment that demonizes you at every turn for not instantly remedying all of the nation’s ills, while providing little support for this herculean task.

Then there are the myriad challenges of preparing lessons, designing activities, teaching the actual class, and grading papers. Once you’ve finished all of that, you can write up your goal reflection for the year, finish your club sponsor duties (for which you may or may not get paid), and help struggling students after school. Also don’t forget to check your mailbox and remember to send those things to Central Copy before you leave, or else you won’t have them when you need them on Friday. Also that student who is doing the independent study project needs to meet with you.

Being a teacher means you are never free from the enormous list of things you have to get done before you can make a to-do list for all the other things you have to get done. Every teacher knows that feeling: it would be so helpful to make a to-do list, but you can’t afford that luxury

85 before you make those copies for third hour.

Don’t get me wrong — I love my job and I cannot imagine doing anything else. I also love my district and I’m very lucky to have a supportive administration that respects me.

But it’s a job with stress like you will not believe. I tell you this not because I want to scare you, but because I want you to prepare to deal with it. One of the biggest mistakes teachers make (like many people) is assuming they’re fine just because they’re not having a nervous breakdown at the moment. But stress is like plaque on your teeth: it must be dealt with constantly, before the toothache begins. My way might not be your way, and that’s fine. But you’ve got to find some way to deal with your stress and take time to do so regularly.

Wipe your mind.

Mindfulness has been a life-saving part of my life for decades. It comes to us from the zen buddhist tradition, but at its core it has nothing to do with religion. I try to meditate every day, and I recently wrote two books about it: MindWipe and MindWipe 2. I distribute free copies ​ ​ ​ ​ of the first book to students, but I offer them to my colleagues too.

In a nutshell, mindfulness is the process of being in the moment. Take a pause and do this now. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing (so long as it’s not driving a car), stop. Take three deep breaths. Listen carefully to the sounds around you. Feel yourself slow down. Take stock of what’s going on inside you. Are you tired, hungry, nervous, calm? When thoughts arrive, let them pass like clouds in the sky. If a fear or worry shows up, let it pass. Let your mind return, like a stirred glass of water, to a peaceful state of stillness.

86 Mindfulness is being introduced to many schools across the country and around the world, which is good. It can help students with anger management and focus in their lives. But it’s also important for educators to practice mindfulness. Not only for our own health and well-being, but because being mentally prepared is essential if we wish to give the students our best. Setting aside even three minutes each day for a quick dip into the pool of mindfulness can help you deal with the chaos in your classroom.

This is not a substitute for demanding smaller classes or democratic control over our workplaces, which would cause less stress to begin with. Fortunately, we don’t have to choose between being mentally healthy and fighting for more humane workplaces.

The US public school is a particularly rapid-fire institution; the school in which I teach certainly is. As a result, teachers are constantly urged to be more efficient, more thorough, more speedy. We need to consult with every student every day. We need to communicate with parents.

While in the building, our lives are regimented down to the exact second each bell rings. We get precisely 24 minutes for lunch, during which time we must also make copies and send emails and file papers. The school will never urge us to slow down.

Therefore we must slow ourselves down.

You must think clearly when you teach, and doing so requires regular wiping of the mind. The stress from first hour can easily — and often will, automatically — encrust your mind, clouding your ability to work with second hour. Add more stress during second hour, and third hour can be even more difficult. No wonder so many teachers find themselves overwhelmed during prep hours, but there’s no time to rest; we’ve got more copies to make and papers to

87 grade and emails to send and packets to file. Many teachers feel as though taking time for themselves during the school day is verboten. We’re here for the kids, right? So isn’t it ​ ​ selfish to spend time releasing the stress that weighs on us?

This is a trap of the ego. The ego says nothing is more important than the work we’re always doing, and everything will fall apart the moment we step away from the desk. We’re so very important, and doing as many things as possible every minute of every day is good for us — and good for the kids, right? Don’t fall for this absurdity. Taming the ego can make us less overwhelmed, which can make us better teachers.

Of course it’s also a trap of the ego to say that we’re more important than the students.

Lazy teachers are driven by various ego trips about how they can teach just fine without working hard at all. But after a decade and a half in the classroom, I can say with absolute conviction that the biggest problem facing teachers in the US right now is not laziness, but rather compulsive overwork and lack of self-care. This is, of course, as much a reminder to myself as it is a warning to others.

You are not doing anyone favors — not your students, not your family, not yourself — when you push yourself too hard or refuse to take time to de-stress. Martyrs make for mediocre teachers, and we have to take care of ourselves.

No one else is going to do it.

Allow bad days to pass.

This is a letter to a teacher having a bad day.

88 First of all, I’m sorry you’re having a bad day. Contrary to what some people may believe, you are entitled to have a bad day — a bad week, even. I know how this profession can get you down, especially if you live in a place where teachers are constantly blamed for a bevy of problems mostly out of their control. Even when conditions are perfect (and they never are), the amorphous and quixotic nature of education itself sometimes makes ours a soul-crushing enterprise.

I’m writing this letter because I feel uniquely qualified to address your situation. Like

Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five, I sometimes feel like I am unstuck ​ ​ in time. Right now, for example, I am a well-heeled high-school English teacher in Wisconsin.

And yet moments ago I was a fresh-faced middle-school student in Florida. And in a blink of an eye I shall be a sagacious veteran with thirty years’ experience.

Today I woke up at 4:30 AM, and not by choice. I believe teachers suffer disproportionately from insomnia. If sleeplessness is a part of your bad day, I know what that’s like. It makes everything worse, and it makes dealing with adversity that much more aggravating. If you’re like me, you’ve tried (or are trying) exercise, change of diet, meditation and/or medication, to little or no avail. Alas, I expect the only thing that will guarantee you continuous peaceful nights of restful sleep is alternative employment.

The point is that I’m having a bad day, just like you. Grades are due soon, I have mountains of papers to score, and my students are hitting the springtime slacker slump. Even worse, I’m filled with an indescribable melancholia that resists direct analysis and simple remedy. And yet I feel compelled (and qualified) to buoy your spirits and my own.

89 I’m not writing to say “Hang in there” or “Take a nap after school”. Both of those, of course, are decent pieces of advice, although if your life is like mine, you’re too busy to fit in a nap. I’m writing to tell you that you need to subdue your frustration and/or sadness and get to a place where your best teacher-self can emerge for a few hours. This self is nurtured by our ancestors and summoned by the pages of history. It is the self that heeds the call of destiny and drives us to excellence beyond the measure of simple evaluation tools or standardized tests. It is the fire that burned when you taught your best class ever. Take a second and remember that moment. It sparkled in your eyes when someone first said: “You would be a good teacher.” It is the electricity that courses through your fingertips when you hear a student say “oh” with undertones of enlightenment. Or, if you’re like me and you don’t get to hear such things very often, it comes when a student laughs at a joke or understands an obscure cultural reference.

Allow this energy to exist in you for a moment. Let it open you to the possibility of the superb, to which you may be closed. The frustrations in the lives of educators do something perverse and especially dangerous: Because our job requires opening minds, our inability to make this happen can cause us to believe that our own minds should close up a bit. Especially if you’re a person — like me — who seeks to learn from the students, you might start to wonder if their reluctance to drink fully from the waters of life is a sensible path to walk.

But you are honor-bound to do the opposite. You need to bash that notion apart on the vicious rocks of truth and understanding. You have a wisdom from which your students need to benefit, and you have a job to do — so get ready to do it.

I’m not telling you to force a fake grin on your face and flounder inside a façade of phoniness. I’m telling you that something is going to come along soon that will help you correct

90 the skewed view of the universe you currently possess, and you need to be ready to see it. If you wallow in despair, you will miss it, and that’s not okay. I’m not telling you not to be sad, because ​ ​ sometimes that’s inevitable. But as the saying goes, the best way to feel good yourself is to do something good for someone else.

As you know, there’s no better way to do this than by teaching someone something important. Soon you will have a student who really needs you to be awesome. Some girl who recently got punched by her father. Or a boy who has no friends and eats lunch alone every day.

Or a kid who has obvious talent but no self-confidence. Or a kid who has ample self-confidence but no real talent. One of your kids just broke up with his girlfriend, and another cried himself to sleep last month because he’s never had one (and believes he never will). One of your kids doesn’t have enough to eat, and lacks other forms of nourishment too. Of course most of them will never mention these problems they’re having, but you and I know that they’re real. While you can’t fix all of these things on your own, you can give them some strength — intellectual, moral, emotional, social — to help them weather the storm.

So have your bad day, but don’t let it have the last word. Stare into the void, but be ready for it to stare back, as Nietzsche told us. And don’t let the myriad creatures, of which Lao-Tzu spoke, crush the spirit others need to find the way (the one which cannot be named, natch). And as Marge Simpson tells Lisa: “If you want to be sad, be sad. We’ll ride it out with you. And when you get finished feeling sad, we’ll still be there.”

Take a few minutes right now to wrestle the sadness down a little. Turn on some loud music and bump your head. Or find a quote you love and think about how it applies to this moment. Or sit and count your breaths and clear your mind. The papers you need to grade aren’t

91 going anywhere, and the kids won’t be in for a few minutes yet. You’re no good to anyone if your brain’s fried or your soul burns out. So take care of those things.

This too shall pass, and it will only pass more slowly — and painfully — if you chastise yourself or avoid reality or divert your frustrations onto other people. Accept your reality for what it is, and then seek some tiny way to transform it. You’ll find one soon, if your eyes are open.

Good luck.

92 5. Great teachers are all around us.

“The world more often rewards the appearance of merit than merit itself.”

François de La Rochefoucauld Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665-1678) ​

Let’s be clear: All teaching awards are hooey. How can we possibly evaluate the infinite mix of activities and proclivities that make for great teaching? Sometimes I’m certain that I’m failing a class or a student, only to get a kind note of thanks from a thoughtful young person.

Other times it’s the exact opposite — I believe I’m knocking out of the park, but the students complain about the lesson. This goes to show how difficult it is for us to determine our own efficacy, so how much more difficult is it for other people to judge, especially when they only visit the classroom a couple of times a semester?

In 2005 I was nominated by my Assistant Principal for a statewide teaching award. It was a great honor to be nominated, and I was humbled by the recognition inherent in that small act.

Before I found out the results (I did not win), I thought long and hard about the process of giving awards like Teacher of the Year. I decided that all teaching awards are utter hooey.

There is no fair way to measure how excellent a teacher is — and certainly no fair way to ​ ​ compare two different teachers. Where could we possibly look to make such an assessment?

● Standardized Test Scores? Ha! Test scores are as good a way to tell how well a ​ teacher's doing as garbage collection rates are to measure a mayor's performance. Which

is to say: If the garbage backs up in the streets, the mayor's probably doing a bad job.

93 Apart from that, there's no correlation. Every great teachers gets students who refuse to

learn, and terrible teachers have students who are intrinsically motivated to do well.

● Applications? How can this be reliable? What is a teacher going to say? “I totally suck in ​ the classroom. I start crying whenever someone's late with her homework.” A teacher

isn't an objective judge of his own abilities in the classroom. The bad ones always say

they're doing swell, and the good ones always feel like they're never good enough. I don't

see why they even bother with applications for these things. Even if the applicant stands

out somehow, this is a demonstration of a teacher's writing abilities, not teaching skill.

● Administrator Evaluation? This is as close as we can come to an objective assessment, ​ but it’s still not close at all. Administrators have professional training, and mostly they

know what they’re looking for when it comes to good teaching. But their perspective is

limited by time, and reducing the process of teaching to a couple of random snapshots is

absurd. I love the administrators at my school. But they observe me — at most — twice

or three times each year. Basing any kind of award on such a random sampling is

laughable. Besides, teachers teach differently when an administrator is in the room.

That’s a fact. Heisenberg is in effect here; when someone’s observing us, our behavior is

different, period.

● Student Feedback? This is another worthwhile element, since the students are the only ​ other people in that classroom every day. But to say that they're impartial observers is

ridiculous. Even if all your kids love being in your class (like mine do), they're being

evaluated, and therefore we have a reverse Heisenberg situation. And which students are

94 speaking on the teacher's behalf when considering an award? Those hand-selected by the

teacher. It's like an insecure politician’s “town hall” meetings, filled with sycophants and

supporters.

● Parent Recommendations? Again — who is the teacher going to ask? “Mr. and Mrs. ​ Jerkface, your kid has vowed eternal revenge for the way I ridiculed him in class, and I

once told you that you were the worst parents I ever met. But would you please write me

a letter of recommendation?” I got a very nice letter from the parents of a

highly-motivated student for the aforementioned award, and it was lovely. But I expect

every other teacher applying got similar letters.

● Community Members? Now we’re even further removed from the classroom itself. ​ What kind of evidence is this? “We heard from Lou, the owner of Lou's Pizza, that you

were doing some great stuff in your classroom.” Feh.

● Pig Entrails? This is as valid as anything mentioned above. ​

Of course I know that these awards are given because We the Community Want to

Recognize Excellence in Education and Give Super Teachers an Extra Boost and Blah Blah

Blah. But these competitions just pass out small wads of dough to the winners, and make the losers feel bad. If you really want to Honor Excellence in Education, cut our class sizes in half and give us a raise — all of us! ​

Remember that evaluating teachers is difficult.

95 The difficulty in deciding who should win Teacher of the Year proves how tricky it is to evaluate teachers in the first place. There is value in such evaluations, but they should be based on several assumptions; the first is that teachers are professionals who are constantly striving to get better at their craft. The second is that rewards and punishments are anathema to a worthwhile evaluation. The third is that a great many factors affecting student achievement are outside the teacher’s control. (I will again refer to the 2010 Department of Education study described in Chapter 1.)

Teacher evaluations in 21st century America ignore all of these. Instead, cynical advocates of “reform” begin the conversation by complaining loudly about all the horrible teachers clogging our schools with ineptitude and indifference. It is therefore the responsibility of every teacher to prove that s/he is not a terrible teacher, using various arcane instruments of review. As a result, we must regularly cherry-pick evidence of our competence — a task which takes precious time away from activities that would actually help us get better at teaching.

To make matters worse, these illegitimate (or, to be more generous, inadequate) forms of evaluation are more and more often tied to forms of reward and/or punishment, monetary and otherwise. Some districts tie salaries directly to the test scores achieved by a teacher’s class.

Others offer a base salary and then pile “bonuses” on for each benchmark of teacher quality achieved. Still others take a more macroscopic approach and place a teacher on probation if the students’ grades/test scores/graduation rates/portfolios don’t improve over time.

Leaving aside the theoretical flaws in these approaches, we should all be outraged by the practical flaws inherent to the process. Even if we ignore cheating for now (we’ll come back to ​

96 this), there are thousands of ways to finesse the numbers to provide the appearance of success, while the reality remains unchanged.

In Season 4 of The Wire (a show every American should watch from start to finish), ​ ​ former police officer Roland 'Prezbo' Pryzbylewski — who has become a middle-school teacher

— discusses the school’s fixation on test scores with his colleague Grace Sampson:

Pryzbylewski: I don't get it. All this so we score higher on the state tests? If we're ​ teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?

Sampson: Nothing. It assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are ​ improving. The scores stay down, they can't.

Pryzbylewski: Juking the stats. ​

Sampson: Excuse me? ​

Pryzbylewski: Making robberies into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the ​ stats, and majors become colonels. I've been here before.

Sampson: Wherever you go, there you are. ​

I am offended by a political context in which “juking the stats” is standard operating procedure. I am offended by a social climate that assumes teachers are terrible, or at best mediocre. I am offended by a simple-minded approach to education that uses a shallow calculus of mere numbers to interpret the vast universe of interactivity that takes place every day inside every classroom in our nation. And I refuse to accept flawed methods of viewing teachers through glasses (or scanners) darkly in the name of “high standards” or “teacher quality”.

Which is not to say that we shouldn’t evaluate teacher activity. Even if the process is difficult and inherently limited, we teachers deserve worthwhile feedback on how we’re doing.

97 Some people have criticized this perspective of mine, claiming that I’m scared to be judged — nothing could be farther from the truth. I simply insist on feedback and evaluations that actually help teachers and students.

Celebrate your Teacher Heroes.

I have many Teacher Heroes; too many to list. But I want to call out a few. I’ve been blessed to be surrounded all my life by heroic educators, starting with mom and dad.

My father was a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Florida. He devoted himself to his students and toiled endlessly to provide them with the same excellent education he received at MIT. He left academia to start a consulting firm when I was young, but he never lost his love for helping young people expand their minds. My brother and I were the main beneficiaries of that love, in the realms of school and beyond.

My mother spent decades teaching children at the elementary and middle levels, mostly concentrating on kids with behavioral and emotional “disorders”. Those of us in the trenches know that such classifications are usually shorthand for chaotic or dysfunctional or horrible home lives.

I only rarely watched my mother work her magic in the classroom, so we have to accept that I’m biased here. On the other hand, I saw the love she received from her students, and I know you don’t get that kind of affection if you’re lousy at your job. She always taught her students (and me, and my brother) incredible things about mercy, compassion, and determination. Given the incredible losses she has suffered through the years (first my father, and

98 then her second husband, and then a third partner), she has also taught me powerful things about holding on and retaining hope.

My Teacher Heroes also include my high school French teacher Madame Lopez, and my journalism teacher Ms. Maples. They related to us students with respect, high expectations, and humor. They made learning fun, but demanded that we do it even when it was dull. Their passion for the material was infectious, and they loaded our toolboxes with gadgets to make the process easier. Ms. Maples loved Thoreau, and kept a jar of water from Walden Pond on her desk. Mme.

Lopez created silly songs to help us memorize vocabulary words, and they worked like magic.

Ms. Maples shepherded us through competitions with the Columbia Scholastic Press

Association, where I won an award for Best Humor Writing. Mme. Lopez drove us every year to

Le Congrès de la Culture Française en Floride, where I won a blue ribbon for extemporaneous ​ speaking. They made their classrooms into supportive communities, and showed us what it means to be part of something larger than yourself. I keep in touch with them through social media, and thank them regularly for the incredible impact they’re had on me.

My list of Teacher Heroes would be incomplete without discussing the English teachers

I’ve been lucky to work beside at my current high school. I’m reluctant to name them individually, because I’m sure I’ll leave someone out and feel bad (and make them feel bad). But

I want to show my deep respect and appreciation, so I can’t resist. Some of the folks named below are no longer in the classroom, but I want to salute them anyway.

Ms. Birkrem is one of the most generous people I’ve ever met, running herself ragged to give everyone else everything while asking for nothing in return. Ms. Blanding is a creative soul with a beautiful passion for rowing. Ms. Butler is a leader of peerless skill, and sacrifices herself

99 daily to give students everything she has to offer (in the classroom and in the yearbook club and in a dozen community activities). Ms. Buchanan was my first student teacher ever, and proved herself right away as a superb educator. Ms. Coulthard is a stoic but deeply committed lover of learning and students. Mr. Dahm became one of my best teacher friends once we realized the similarities in our political outlooks and conceptions of humor. (When he retired, I made a fun video in the form of a mock political ad — “What do we really know about Mr. Dahm?”) Ms. ​ ​ Davis has an amazing talent for mixing scathing humor into her compassionate praxis. Ms.

Droese is indefatigable in her warmth and positivity, which she extends to both students (in her classroom as well as the dance team she coaches) and colleagues. Mr. Hansen is a fun-loving goofball with a serious dedication to excellence in the classroom. Ms. Hohlstein is a champion guide for young writers, with a magnificent (and infectious) laugh. Mr. Hook is a fun but tough guy with a love for long German words and difficult video games. Ms. Jarecki is a no-nonsense sorceress who gets the most reluctant students to achieve the impossible. Ms. Keuler became a favorite among the students as a substitute teacher years before she joined the English department. Ms. Kobs loves literature so much, she named her son after a character in To Kill A ​ Mockingbird. Mr. Lasure is a being of pure energy, transmitting his bottomless joie de vivre into ​ ​ ​ his students. Ms. Nicoud is wry and insouciant, with compassion and high expectations without ​ ​ suffering fools. Ms. Phillips is a joyful and upbeat presence, bringing forth the best in her drama students; we were best-friend classroom-neighbors for many years. Ms. Ruggles is a compassionate and relentlessly ebullient mom-teacher. Mr. Schissel is a gruff but lovable fellow who can’t stay away from the school, even though he retired several years ago. Ms. Schlagel was my second student teacher, and brings a joyful urgency into every class she taught. Ms.

100 Schroetter was a sharp-tongued paragon of intellectual excellence, and the world lost a shining light of education when she died several years ago. Ms. Sprangers brings a deep love for literature, ideas, and excellent humor into the classroom every day. Mr. Stensrud is the closest thing to a twin teacher-brother I’ve ever found; our shared passions for graphic novels, hip-hop music, and quality TV shows would be alarming if they weren’t so darn cool. Ms. Stevenson is a tireless educator, both in and out of the classroom; she spends countless hours after the regular school day to sponsor the Black Student Union, and teach a step dance club in another high school. Mr. Strader is the definition of laid-back without slacking off; he provides a staid confidence and support for his students that is rare in the world of teaching. Ms. Weber links a tough-as-nails level of academic rigor with a deep commitment to providing support for young people. Ms. Williams brought a calm magnificence into her classroom, and forced open safe spaces in the school climate by founding a club for LGBTQ youth. This list could go on forever, and I feel bad leaving out all the other amazing people I work with. But suffice it to say that I couldn’t have landed in a more excellent department or faculty.

I also need to mention two other Teacher Heroes, for their incredible courage and devotion to young people.

Liviu Librescu survived the Nazi holocaust and Ceausescu’s regime in Romania. He lived in Israel for a time, and in 1985 he moved to the United States, where he took an engineering professorship at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

On Monday 16 April 2007, while teaching, he realized a man with a gun was trying to get into his classroom. He blocked the door and was shot to death so his students could escape through the window. He saved the lives of 20 people.

101 Victoria Soto was born in Connecticut in 1985, and began teaching first grade at Sandy

Hook Elementary School in 2010. On Friday 14 December 2012, a man with a gun entered her classroom. She threw herself in front of the children to protect them, and was shot to death.

These teachers represent an amazing manifestation of love and compassion for young people, sacrificing their very lives for their students’ futures. I can only hope that if — heaven forbid — I am ever in such a situation, I have the strength and courage to do the same thing.

Recognize great teachers in movies that aren’t really about teaching.

Hollywood loves to make mediocre movies about teachers, and I’ll run through the good ones in a moment. But first I want to give a shout-out to five awesome fictional teachers from movies that aren’t even about school.

1. Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid (1984). Some of the best teachers train the students in ​ ​ ​ what they need to know, without them knowing it. Daniel-San thinks he’s just waxing the

car and painting the fence. He’s all like “This has nothing to do with karate! When am I

ever going to need to know how to do this crap?" But then when it’s karate-fighting time,

he’s totally ready to whoop his enemies. The simplicity of Mister Miyagi’s pedagogy is

also evident in his commandment to Daniel-San at the start of the film: “I teach. You

learn.” No benchmarks, no standardized curriculum, no busywork, no excuses, no

differentiated quizzes — no quizzes at all. “I teach, you learn.” That’s it.

2. Yoda from The Empire Strikes Back (1980). For all of his fighting and diplomacy in the ​ ​ ​ prequels, Yoda is a teacher beyond all else. He is Lao-Tzu and Sun-Tzu together in one.

102 Subdue enemies without fighting. Master yourself before you confront others. Do or do

not; there is no try. Luke is an archetypal student, like Daniel-San — too impatient to sit

down and think about what he already knows. Yoda’s all about the dance between

student and the knowledge. His greatest achievement, we might say, comes when he dies

and literally gets out of Luke’s way. But not before showing him the door. (This is as

good a place as any to mention Morpheus from The Matrix, who gets an Honorable ​ ​ Mention.) Yoda teaches us about looking within. Get rid of your attachments. Walk the

path. The force that can be named is not the true force.

3. V from V for Vendetta (2005). It’s impossible to explain why V is a great teacher without ​ ​ ​ spoiling the story. He goes to extreme lengths to educate Evey, and while it’s horrifying

(and ethically questionable), it’s done for the sake of enlightenment and love. V is also,

of course, teaching everyone how to be responsible citizens, getting them to take charge

of their political destiny. He sacrifices greatly, and inspires others to follow his example.

He’s even more intriguing in the book.

4. Li Mu Bai from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Jen is another archetypal ​ ​ ​ student: She is smart, mixed-up, and incredibly headstrong. She refuses to accept the

possibility that there are things she cannot do, and she rejects the notion of submitting to

authority. In general, these are healthy characteristics. But her story shows the problems

that arise when a student’s ego becomes fanatical. Li Mu Bai is patient, but he cannot

overcome her will. The question is: Should that be his main goal? Why is it so important

that she bow to him? Crouching Tiger is a tragedy through and through, and the teacher ​ ​ makes a crucial error in not accommodating the student’s attitude more carefully. I’ve

103 had students like Jen, and the most dangerous thing we can do to a hidden dragon is

provoke it. Alas, Li Mu Bai learns this the hard way — as does Jen.

5. Lauren from Slam (1998). We only get tiny glimpses of Lauren in the classroom, but she ​ ​ ​ has clearly mastered the art of reaching her students. More to the point, she can

empathize with Ray on the outside, even as she challenges him and demands that he

observe his condition from beyond his own bubble. Perhaps most significant, she

balances guidance with inspiration, leading by example and filling the people around her

with the ambrosia of the muse.

Watch great movies about teaching.

It’s not hard to understand why Hollywood likes to make movies about education.

Photogenic Good Guy/Gal comes into a wretched, dysfunctional institution and turns it around for a small group of kids. Only a few movies about education are downright bad; mostly they romanticize our lives and grant us weird superpowers over insane conditions. Reality is mostly anathema to Hollywood, and realistic depictions of public schools even more so. Usually it’s a passionate white person struggling valiantly against the impoverished inertia of young black kids

(Dangerous Minds, The Freedom Writers), igniting some hidden spark that (for some reason) no ​ ​ ​ ​ person of color could possibly reach. Lean on Me and The Great Debaters twist this scenario by ​ ​ ​ ​ putting Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington, respectively, into the inspiring leadership roles. Dead Poets Society and Mr. Holland’s Opus are decent meditations on adolescence and ​ ​ ​ ​ music (respectively), but they don’t ring especially true for me. Robin Williams works in a

104 private school with very small classes and highly motivated kids. And Mr. Holland takes a teaching job in order to have more free time? Sorry, what? ​ ​ It goes without saying that the movies are always different from the true stories on which they’re usually based, with varying degrees of significance. Joe Clark is shown expelling troublesome students in Lean on Me, and it’s hard to know what that meant for misguided youths ​ ​ under his purview. Suffice to say we classroom teachers can’t do this unless the circumstances are extreme. Nor would I want to. Erin Gruwell, played by Hilary Swank in Freedom Writers, ​ ​ worked two jobs to buy books for her students, then enjoyed a bizarre confluence of happenstance involving one student on house arrest reading The Diary of Anne Frank in one ​ ​ night, after which she convinced her classmates to read it too. Perhaps if we could order the house arrest of our most persuasive troubled students, perhaps we could — like her — achieve the unlikely goal of getting all of our struggling students to attend college. Otherwise, I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. ​ ​ The biggest problem in these movies, however, is the scope of the story arc. No one achieves magical transformation in their students in just one school year — no one. We see kids change, sure. Sometimes dramatically. But it takes years, plural. It’s a long, often boring ride of tedium and absurd mistakes and learning the hard way, until we think we’re bashing our heads into concrete walls with only facial bruising and brain damage to show for it. And then, one day, one kid out of twenty says “Hey, wait a second.” And then things start to change, very slowly.

The PBS documentary series Frontline captured this with a rare elegant realism in the 2012 ​ ​ program “Dropout Nation”.

105 Some movies do a better job of showing the ups and downs within a conventional framework. Stand and Deliver is rightly praised for mixing inspiration with sociological acumen ​ ​ without adding melodrama. The Great Debaters is a good movie, but it’s as much (or more) ​ ​ about segregated US history as it is education. 187 offers a weird mixture of hyperviolence, ​ ​ oversimplification, and stylized surfaces; but it also challenges standard conceptions of masculinity and shows Samuel L. Jackson as a concerned teacher in a tough spot. (The soundtrack from British trip-hoppers Massive Attack doesn’t hurt either.)

That said, three movies about teaching really stand out:

1. Half Nelson (2006) stars Ryan Gosling as a cocaine-addict history teacher in a losing ​ fight with the abstract monsters of apathy, economic pressure, confusion, and mixed

priorities. This is the movie which, more than any other, accurately captures the

psychological terror of teaching’s darkest moments. He goes in knowing he can’t do ​ ​ much for his students — but he gives it a shot anyway. Unlike most movies about

education, it shows kids with their heads down, and not just in the first scenes. The

teacher is not a wizard here. Gosling is not the hero of this story, which actually shines

because it has none. Superb performances by Shareeka Epps and Anthony Mackie

overpower Gosling in some ways, since their lives are steady by comparison. It’s not a

pleasant or uplifting film, but it delivers an impressionistic panorama that rings painfully

true.

2. Election (1999) is disturbing and inappropriate for young people, but that’s not why it’s ​ on this list. It features abhorrent behavior from teachers, infidelity, criminality, and foul

language, but that’s not why it’s on this list. It’s the best collection of unreliable narrators

106 ever assembled in American cinema, but that’s not why it’s on this list. Matthew

Broderick is fantastic as a teacher who would fit in with those he dupes in Ferris ​ Bueller’s Day Off, but that’s not why it’s on this list. Reese Witherspoon is excellent as a ​ machiavellian firebrand in student government, but that’s not why it’s on this list.

Election makes the list because it offers some amazing slices of life from the real lives of ​ teachers. My favorite is Broderick teaching a class on US government, in which he must

cycle through the three branches of government with the help of a small triangle on the

chalkboard. “Legislative, executive, and judicial.” Then we fade forward to the next

iteration of this process — the next day, or next semester, or next year, who knows? The

branches are rearranged, and the teacher is in a different (but similar) shirt-tie combo.

“Legislative, judicial, and executive.” Fade forward. “Judicial, executive, and

legislative.” Fade forward. “Judicial, legislative, and executive.” This is what teaching

really is.

3. Good Will Hunting (1997) will be described as trite by many viewers (including a good ​ friend of mine right after we saw it for the first time), and I won’t argue. But it is also an

elegant canvas of turmoil in the life of a talented young person, and the power (neither

overstated nor understated) that a caring mentor can have. No facile Finding Forrester, ​ ​ the relationship between Will and Sean is humble and honest. As with all of my favorite

movies, the essence of the dilemma is beautifully distilled in one scene (in this case, the

“what do you want?” conversation), which stabs at the heart of every difficult discussion

I’ve ever had with a student. (As Tony Danza says in Illtown: “If you don’t know, you’re ​ ​ lost.”) It’s a nice blend of Gus Van Sant’s best cinematography, sublime music from

107 Elliot Smith, and an essential interrogation of what education is really all for. Plus

shout-outs to Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.

Read great books about education.

There are plenty of books about teaching, but most are soulless and/or fixated on a pedagogical flavor of the month. Most are mixed bags at best. A prime example here is Teach ​ Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College by Doug Lemov. ​ Some of the techniques are obvious, while others are legitimately helpful; a few, however, are absurd. One section praises a teacher for drilling his students on distribution of papers, in order to reduce pass-out time from 18 to 14 seconds. (Think of all the extra instructional time you’ll have!) These books tend to borrow heavily from the business press, emphasizing data and efficiency and results. Nothing is wrong with those things per se, only that they’re often ​ ​ secondary to the deep problems facing young people in a typical classroom.

Many good books have been written about education systems and theory, and I won’t bore the reader with a laundry list of them all. Here, though, are five of my favorites (and one about classroom teaching itself).

1. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (1968) is a staple of educational literature. ​ Because he worked mostly with impoverished adults in agrarian societies, Freire

presumes a level of engagement and internal motivation that will feel alien to many 21st

century US public school teachers. Still, his attack on what he calls “the banking method

108 of education” is spot-on. He helps us remember that education is a process of becoming

more human, not simply earning more money.

2. Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities (1991) is another must-read for every teacher. It ​ ​ quickly became famous for its sharp focus on institutional educational inequality. Things

haven’t changed much in the years since, as evidenced by other books he’s written in the

same vein (Amazing Grace in 1995, Ordinary Resurrections in 2000, Shame of the ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Nation in 2005, and Fire in the Ashes in 2012). Especially for those of us living in ​ ​ ​ relative comfort and privilege, it’s vital to engage with his eyewitness journalism (and

incisive commentary). Systems of educational funding and equality are mostly beyond

the professional purview of the classroom teacher, but we have a right and responsibility

to be aware (and engaged) in such discussions anyway. Just in case The Man ever does

decide to bring us into the room where such decisions are made.

3. Also in the “Books Every Conscious Teacher Has Probably Already Read” file is Diane

Ravitch’s book The Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010). ​ ​ Having served as Assistant Secretary of Education under George W. Bush, Ravitch came

to understand how public policies like No Child Left Behind fail to make education

better, and in fact make it worse. Her insider perspective and solidarity with “in the

trenches” educators make this one a must-read.

4. It’s surprising that bell hooks, also a powerful force for conscious thinking and solidarity,

hasn’t written more books about education, but her text Teaching to Transgress (1994) is ​ ​ ​ a classic. Although the collection of topics goes wide (at the cost, in places, of depth), it

109 offers some important perspectives that every educator should consider. hooks is

unapologetic in her feminism, her advocacy of black empowerment, and her class

consciousness. In a world trying to muffle such voices, her writing is especially important

today.

5. I will also throw in a recommendation for Jamie Vollmer’s book Schools Cannot Do It ​ Alone (2010). You’ve probably heard his most famous contribution to the education ​ conversation, “The Blueberry Story”. (If not, take a moment right now to find it online.

It’s short but superb.) That experience forced him, like Ravitch, to examine his

assumptions and look at the world honestly from the teacher’s point of view. Naturally,

this brought enlightenment and humility. It also brought him to the awareness that we

teachers (and other folks in the school) have been ordered to do more and more and more

all the time, without the resources to make it happen. The book is warm and engaging,

with some intriguing facts sprinkled along the way. (For example: Chapter 5 explains

how Thomas Jefferson proposed a cutthroat system of constantly culling the “best”

students every year, to make up smaller and smaller classes in the upper grades. This, he

said, would produce an intellectual aristocracy that would provide the best educational

resources to the most fitting students.)

6. Finally: The best book ever written about actual teaching practices is The First Days of ​ School by Harry K. Wong (1991). Most of it is focused on elementary students, but there ​ are plenty of practical tips for us secondary folks, too. Wong explains how most

behavioral problems are actually a breakdown of process, and how relating to students

with professionalism and procedure is healthier than reacting with anger and punishment.

110 The first district in which I taught gave every new teacher a copy, and I gobbled it up in

one sitting. To this day, I still use Wong’s randomly-assigned-seating method on the first

day of each semester.

Prepare for a mixed bag during Teacher Appreciation Week.

Every year at the start of May, the US celebrates Teacher Appreciation Week. Educators across the nation are treated to a buffet of lukewarm platitudes about how important our jobs are, and how grateful everyone is for our hard work. Of course people always mean well, and it is nice to hear kind words of thanks for our sacrifices. The best gifts are notes from students, and maybe a little chocolate.

In 2015, however, I was struck by an article in the New York Times, headlined “Please ​ ​ Don’t Thank Me For My Service”, in which a Green Beret named Michael Freedman suggests that the constant stream of gratitude from civilians toward veterans feels hollow. These comments, he says, are a way for the person to say “I haven't thought about any of this.”

I've never served in the military, but it seems to me that veterans of our armed forces — women and men who risk their lives and experience unspeakable horrors, in our name — don’t need speeches or yellow ribbon magnets on cars. It seems to me that they need, more than anything, proper armor in the field. They need better pay and good support for their families, not pork-barrel contracts for defense contractors. They need quality equipment, working technology, and decent hardware. They need deployments that are intelligent and short and ordered only when absolutely necessary. When they return to the US, they need quality (and timely) medical

111 care at the VA; easy access to mental health treatment for PTSD and other maladies; and employment programs to help them re-integrate into civilian life. Most importantly, they need to be heard. As Paul Rieckhoff of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America constantly points out, veterans are usually the last people consulted about matters affecting vets. In short, more than rhetoric and symbolism, soldiers and veterans need good public policy. They need laws and guidelines, backed by sufficient funding and careful oversight, to ensure that their needs are met.

The same is true for teachers. If you are truly grateful for that math teacher who never gave up on you, listen to what she needs for a better classroom. If you smile when you remember your history class, help keep that teacher from being overwhelmed by large classes — which make it harder for him to reach other kids like he reached you. If your life was changed by an amazing English teacher, don’t make her life ten times more difficult by destroying her union in order to balance the state budget.

If you’re not prepared to listen to teachers, don’t bother pretending to appreciate us.

When I worked fast food in my halcyon days of youth, I always laughed when my manager told me what a good job I was doing, while screeching at me to move faster and burn myself less with the french-fry grease, then paying me the minimum wage to boot. (As Chris

Rock once said, “You know what they’re telling you when they pay you minimum wage? ‘Hey, if I could pay you less, I would. But it’s against the law.’”) Now that I’m a teacher, the “move faster” orders have become “raise those standardized test scores” and the french-fry grease has become enormous piles of papers from writing classes stuffed to the brim with students. The burns have been replaced by paper cuts and red ink stains and eye strain from staring at screens.

But the banal afterthoughts of “appreciation” feel about the same.

112 Working people across the United States have been battered savagely in recent years, and obviously teachers aren’t special among those who go in every day to work hard jobs that are important to the future of our communities. Good policy is an important way to show appreciation also to firefighters, police officers, nurses, garbage collectors, secretaries, and fast food cooks. I hope that those who truly want to show gratitude will use that impulse not merely to say thanks, but instead to contact an elected official and urge better policies for those who make a difference.

113 6. Forms can save your life.

“Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.”

James H. Boren When in Doubt, Mumble: A Bureaucrat’s Handbook (1972) ​

Every school day is (for me, at least) an insane rush of madness and meshugas. Every ​ ​ second is precious, and I’ve created a series of forms to help manage that time. Students don’t love filling out paperwork (who does?), but as I tell them, I have to take care of myself and deal with a million things at once. Getting them to put it in writing saves me a lot of stress, and it can help build responsible habits.

The forms have revealed their importance in one other crucial way as well: They allow me to address student concerns in a way that is respectful and honest, without eating up all my time. I believe some teachers are rude or disrespectful to students simply because they’re stressed for time. These forms allow students to be heard and get meaningful feedback.

I also keep a blog of classroom activities, assignments, and due dates — it’s at gotclass.edublogs.org if you want to have a look. Google Classroom is allowing us to move the whole course online, but it’s happening for me in stages. Meanwhile, I use Twitter to send a link to each day’s blog post, along with condensed homework reminders (“AP: Read P&P 103-128”).

I also print out each day’s post and put it in a red binder on the back table. When students miss a day, they have to check The Red Binder. Some of them visit the website, but mostly they don’t think about it until they’re back in my classroom. Sometimes I’m so exhausted at the end of the day that I don’t feel like updating the website. But I force myself, because when 20 kids come in the next day asking “What did we do yesterday?”, The Red Binder is a lifesaver.

114 As with the forms, students sometimes get annoyed. “Why can’t you just tell me?” they ​ ​ ask. That would be easier for them, granted, but it’s much easier for me to use The Red Binder. ​ ​ ​ ​ Besides, there’s always a chance that I will forget to tell someone about one part of the homework from yesterday. When it’s online and in The Red Binder, there’s one source for everyone to consult, and I know it’s complete.

These forms make my life easier, and I’ve been happy to share them with many colleagues over the years. I hope you find them useful. (PDF versions are available on my website fbesp.org for your convenience.) If you want to make your own, based on my designs, please go right ahead. I hereby release all ten of these into the public domain.

#1: This Is Late

115 This is the one my students consume more than any other. Our department has a policy of no work after two weeks beyond the due date. This prevents students turning in everything on the last day of the semester, which happens much too often. The ¾- and ½-off consequences are my own policies; some teachers don’t take any points off for late work. We’re supposed to be grading their ability to meet the standard, after all, and indicating problems like lateness in other ways. Unfortunately, most students — even the motivated kids — don’t care much about those other ways. (This goes back to the “Money vs. Truth” dichotomy from Chapter 1.) If your late-work policy differs from mine, however, you can just cover up those boxes.

You’ll be amazed at how many students simply write “I was absent”, even with the extra ​ ​ line demanding an explanation for absences. You’ll also be amazed by how many students admit that they were simply lazy. But many students also use this form as a way to let me know about legitimate problems they’re facing, especially when those problems don’t merit excused absences or notes from home. (One form read “My friend is going through a really rough time right now, and I needed to be there for her last night.”) It’s possible that some kids try to abuse my trust, and if s/he uses this rationale on a regular basis, I can always put the hammer down and/or bring in Student Services to help. But just as often, I’m surprised to see students giving detailed information about difficulties at home, illness, or other problems — and then insisting that they don’t deserve full credit. Maybe I just work with goody-two-shoes kids.

Because many students equate “late work” with “lost points”, some kids freak out when I remind them to attach a late slip to their work, especially if they told me about their absence or reason beforehand. I simply remind them that the form is for my records, and that they can check ​ ​ the box marked “full credit” and everything will be fine.

116

#2: Digital Assignment

In the days before our school gave every student a laptop, this form was a lifesaver.

When most students turn in paper copies of their assignments, it’s easy to lose track of the emails waiting online. Getting each student to complete one of these makes things easier — and I have something to hand back, with a score and overview comments when I’ve graded the papers.

117

#3: Never Turned In

This has become more helpful than I

realized, and while it is One More Thing To

Do, it saves me work (and anxiety) in the

long run. After each assignment is due, I

wait a day for the responsible kids with

legitimate reasons to turn in their late work.

Then I use a chart of the class roster to tally

who has turned it in. I give a Never Turned ​ In quarter-page slip to every student from ​ whom I did not get the work.

When these go out, three things

happen at the same time: First, the kid who forgot to put his name on his paper get angry and insists that he turned it in. Then I hold up the unnamed paper and he gets to calm down and admit that he messed up. Second, the kid who submitted the work online but forgot to fill out a Digital Assignment Form races to the back table ​ ​ and fills one out. Also some kids laugh and crumple the forms up and throw them on the ground.

I love sharing this detail during parent-teacher conferences. Sometimes I’ll save them.

Some students are gone so much that filling out Never Turned In forms becomes absurd. ​ ​ But once in a while a student will miss a lot of school for a good reason, and having a stack of slips to hand them can be easier than trying to sort it all out after the fact.

118

#4: Seat Change Request

I assign seats in my class, mostly because it’s how I learn their names. But it also keeps disruptive behavior down, and it’s a fun way to start the semester: When the students enter the room for the first time, I hand them cards with famous authors on them. Each student must find the matching card on a desk. I tell them “This is a test” and “You’re being watched”, but they have to figure out what’s going on by themselves. After a few students solve the puzzle, they sometimes help newcomers out. Sometimes they just smirk and watch them wander around, confused. Occasionally a student who is dazed and/or confused will hand a “Toni Morrison” card back to me and say “No, my name is Tim.” Once the bell rings, I make sure everyone has found

119 the right seat. Then I congratulate them for passing the first test and inform them that they all have A’s in the class.

The Seat Change Request form is the first one I tell them about, because I know that ​ ​ some people don’t like sitting near the window, and some people find themselves next to people who don’t smell good. (A joke, of course.) But I also make them wait two weeks to fill out a Seat ​ Change Request form, so I can stabilize my mind and learn names. (A student with a medical ​ need — eyesight, for example, or an IEP — can file a request right away.) Besides, I explain, the person in the next desk might have run out of deodorant and tomorrow they’ll smell better. And maybe you’ll make a new friend.

The assigned-seats policy is another one that clashes with my anarchist convictions. In a perfect world, students can sit wherever they like. And to be honest, I would prefer that too. But it’s hard to keep my brain organized when everyone is in a different spot every day. And classes that get chaotic are much harder to organize once they’ve had a taste of chaos. It’s much easier to ​ ​ put my foot down like a tyrant in the first weeks, and then ease back into voluntary associations when possible. Put another way: When I have to choose between less-productive freedom and more-productive tyranny, I choose the latter, because that’s what the district and school administrations expect. I gots to get paid, after all.

I have occasionally been willing to toss out the assigned-seats thing altogether. For example, some Creative Writing II classes have only 11 students in them, so I learn the names quickly (especially since half of them were with me for CW1) and they tend to be pretty motivated kids. Those who aren’t — and we always get a couple, even in a class like CW2 where you wouldn’t expect them — don’t usually disrupt those who want to work.

120 Kids will always test me at the start of the semester, by switching to a different seat, usually one spot over or next to a friend nearby. I make a fuss as soon as I notice, to show them that it’s not okay. (This is one rare power struggle I will engage in, because it’s important.) They have to file a form and get it approved. Sorry kids, that’s how it works.

#5: I Want An Answer

On the first day of the semester, I tell the kids that I always have reasons for what I do. I remind them that “because I said so” is not a good reason for a policy. I also explain that I don’t always have time to explain why I’m giving an assignment or enforcing a policy. That’s why I made the I Want An Answer form. They can put their question in writing and I can respond (in ​ ​ more depth) in my free time. Because of course I have oodles of that.

121 The best thing about the I Want An Answer form is that students use it for all sorts of ​ ​ things. I’ve gotten questions about teaching, surviving adolescence, family, current events, philosophy, video games, romance, politics, life, movies, books, music, history, and a billion other topics. Sometimes I reply with a single sentence, and sometimes I write three pages in response. If a student doesn’t put a name on the form, I post my response on the wall of the classroom for all to see. Over the years I’ve collected the most important and interesting exchanges in Mr. P’s Big Book of Questions and Answers. There’s a lot of stuff there; maybe ​ ​ someday I’ll type it up and publish it.

#6: I Will Be Gone

122 I only made this recently, and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. I appreciate knowing about an upcoming absence, but I don’t always remember to gather materials in time.

With this form I can figure out what the student needs and jot down some instructions. Those students conscientious enough to warn me about an impending absence are usually thoughtful enough to provide ample time to gather what they need.

The dirty secret about this form is that I don’t always know exactly what we’ll be doing in every class during every day of the semester. (I know some teachers who literally plan every day of every semester before the school year begins.) I have a solid framework for every semester, and I know when we’re doing what, in a general sense. But I’m not a rigid person in general, and sometimes a good discussion is more important than racing to the next assignment.

Sometimes I’ll find an amazing TED Talk and it will become the focus of our next class.

Sometimes I just need to keep the schedule loose because individual meetings for The Big Story are taking longer than expected.

When a student submits an I Will Be Gone form, however, I basically lock myself into the ​ ​ schedule I give her. I don’t want her to be bored when she gets back because she’s already done what I had to delay for the rest of the class — although when a student misses several days of school, she’s overwhelmed and doesn’t mind having a free period in my class to catch up. And I don’t want her to have extra stuff to make up because we made it through more than I expected.

So in a way these forms become a prophecy for the future of our classroom, and I feel really weird if the class doesn’t do exactly what I tell the student to do while she’s gone. Then again most students don’t even do the work until after they return, so it’s often a moot point anyway.

123

#7: What’s Up With This Grade?

I originally made this form in jest, for a student who always thought he deserved a higher grade than he received. I thought he would give up after my tenth detailed explanation of which points he lost and why, but his persistence was matched only by his unwillingness to proofread carefully. If he had spent half the energy on polishing his work before turning it in as he used to ​ ​ complain after getting it back, the problem would have solved itself. ​ ​ Over time, however, What’s Up With This Grade has become a rarely-used but helpful ​ ​ form for those few students who legitimately find a problem with their scores. Sometimes, for example, I wrongly believe someone doesn’t deserve full credit for late work. Even when I disagree with the student’s complaint and roll my eyes at their chutzpah for grade-grubbing

(which does happen), I will occasionally use the request as a way to strike a compromise and

124 give back one or two lost points. This lets me be merciful without fully acquiescing to an absurd demand. Plus, it lets them know that I don’t get hung up on every point — and they shouldn’t, either!

#8: Writ Of Wrongful Accusation

Students in the ninth grade (14-15 years old) are notorious for disputing accusations of wrongdoing. When I taught ninth grade, every week I would tell some student to knock it off — usually something minor, like “stop talking” — only to get an outraged tirade about how “it wasn’t me”. Eventually, like Liz Lemon, I got cramps in my ocular nerves from rolling my eyes so much and this form was born. Not only does it allow me to end the discussion (or at least move it onto paper), but it injects a bit of humor as well.

125 Unfortunately, most students willing to kick up a fuss about this stuff are also unfamiliar with the concept of a writ. As a result, the number one reaction to this form is “Hey! You ​ ​ misspelled write.” This is normally followed by a friend or classmate, eager to see what I just ​ ​ handed this person, explaining the different in a hasty attempt to save him (almost always a male student) from further embarrassment.

The most entertaining part of this form is the final section, wherein the student is allowed to request a remunerative follow-up. Usually they go overboard and demand one of my paychecks, or ask for a regal title (once it was “bow before speaking to me”) for the rest of the school year. Sometimes, to show that I don’t hold grudges, I will go along with these requests just for fun. King Mike got tired of being called “Your Majesty” pretty fast.

#9: My Teacher Is A Stupid Moron

126

As with #8, this one came out of annoying situations in which I was being chastised for policies and decisions that younger students didn’t like. (My copy of this form actually says Mr. ​ P Is A Stupid Moron, because it’s nice to have personalized paperwork.) By calling myself ​ names, I beat them to the punch, rob the insults of their power, and demonstrate my self-effacing sense of humor. This usually gets a laugh when I hand it to a student.

Again, this form allows the student to make their case and get a serious response, or at least a response that is as serious as their complaint deserves. Over time, as I have moved to teaching more mature students — and as my teaching style has eliminated such petty squabbles

— I have received fewer and fewer of these forms. Those who are tempted to grab one usually turn to “I Want An Answer” instead.

#10: I Was Late Because...

In the spirit of keeping the lines of

communication open — without causing

class to grind to a halt — comes the I Was ​ Late Because form. Most teachers will handle ​ repeated tardies with either indifference

(which isn’t acceptable to me) or a “See me

after class” discussion. Sometimes those are

necessary, of course, but most of the time

lateness is a painfully banal matter with very

127 little need for discussion. As with the late form, this slip allows the student to plead his case, and

I can follow up if necessary with parents, administrators, or other teachers. It also gives me something concrete I can use (or even quote from, if I’m on the ball) during parent-teacher conferences.

Most importantly, this slip lets the student take responsibility, if the lateness was caused by something dumb. or explain a problem that might not merit an official excuse but nevertheless deserves mercy. By getting it in writing, I can deliberate on it and respond privately, without having to risk embarrassing the kid (or myself).

As always, there’s a chance that a student will write some elaborate explanation with only minimal connections to reality; perhaps more so than during a one-to-one in-person discussion. Each slip must be considered individually, within the context of the teacher’s relationship to the student. And if/when I find that a student’s explanation is not 100% truthful, I congratulate him on his creative fiction writing.

128 7. Teaching is political.

“There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another. […] The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical..”

Emma Goldman My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) ​

One of the most prevalent myths of education in the US is that politics don’t belong in the classroom. It’s a myth because it assumes that politics aren’t already in the classroom the second the kids walk in. If a teacher shines a light on political issues, she risks condemnation or clucks of disapproval from administrators and community members. Some subjects (math, physical education) strike me as being less politically charged than others (literature, history), but our lives are saturated with political impact, and we do the students a disservice when we pretend otherwise.

Let me quickly add that a serious danger exists when a teacher tries to foist his politics on a class, or steamroll the students with his political perspectives. I’ve been in classes like that, and it’s terrible; the teacher has a stature and institutional power (and, often, experience) that must be used with great care. Young people are still trying to figure out where they fit into the world

(although the same is true of most adults, heh), and they don’t need some bully clubbing them over the head with a truncheon of ideology. Enlightened political discourse cannot be achieved when one participant clubs the others into submission.

But that doesn’t mean we have to keep silent about political matters. I believe young people are much more astute than adults give them credit for, and they’re capable of engaging in

129 discourses of great variety without being psychically wounded by differing opinions. The question is how the teacher facilitates these conversations.

I take great pains to make clear that my opinions are merely my own perspectives, and I encourage students to consider them and make up their own minds. Some of my favorite interactions with students over the years have been lively political disagreements, and some of my closest student-teacher relationships have been made with people of different political perspectives.

I’m always sad when a classroom has no one in it willing to push back on my opinion. I think this happens because of our educational environment, which punishes students for speaking their minds — not to mention a social climate in which everyone freezes up as soon as politics is brought out of the shadows. This was true before the 2016 elections, but it’s gotten worse in the years since. There are many causes for this, which I shan’t explore here at length. But I have noticed a simultaneity between onset of our current testing-and-reform mania and the dropoff in student responsiveness. Also cell phones and social media.

I am a political person, because every person (especially everyone living in a democracy) is political. Many people are worn out by the discouraging state of the world and the pathetic mediocrity that passes for political conversation in the United States (and elsewhere). This makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, it leads many people to drop out of political life. They get uncomfortable when political disagreements surface, and they expect there’s no way to have a mature, respectful conversation in such situations. Besides, there’s probably nothing we can do about it all anyway, right? Let’s just change the subject.

130 If you feel this way, I understand your frustration, but I beg you to keep an open mind. I share your irritation with modern political affairs, and I make every effort to avoid the rigidity that so pollutes the American landscape.

Here’s why we shouldn’t change the subject. First of all, it’s simply not true that we can’t change things. That’s a matter of historical record, and I will prove it in the section below about

East Timor. As for being uncomfortable: While it’s true that most political “discourse” in our society is shrill and bitter and partisan and pointless, it’s also false to suggest that this is the best we can do. It is possible for adults (and even teenagers) to have sophisticated, respectful ​ ​ discussions about political issues. We can be passionate and emphatic, while keeping our minds open. We can dispute ideas without pointing fingers or calling names, right? Let’s all agree to this right now. Deal?

Such discussions are, in fact, our duty as citizens in a democracy. If we are ostensibly in charge of our government, then we have a responsibility to be knowledgeable about important issues, and demand that our elected officials to take appropriate action. Part of gaining political consciousness is talking about this stuff with the people around you — your friends, your co-workers, your neighbors. If students never get to practice having these discussions with their classmates, how much more difficult will it be for them to have such discussions as adults? One great danger of a supposedly apolitical classroom is the risk of producing citizens who are unprepared for political life. Young people should not be going into the world without an ​ ​ awareness of the major issues facing them.

The other danger is an inability to consider different points of view. Many young people simply absorb the worldview and political perspectives of their parents and other adults; this

131 leaves them woefully unprepared for independent thought and conscious dialogue. They rely on ideology and parrot the platitudes they’ve heard before, without any ability to incorporate new information or the experiences of other people.

The worst problem facing our democracy right now is the echo-chamber cocoon in which most people hide themselves, hearing only those viewpoints they already agree with and avoiding anything that might make them question their assumptions. US Supreme Court Justice

Antonin Scalia, for example, once told New York magazine that he didn’t read the Washington ​ ​ ​ Post because it’s “so shrilly, shrilly liberal”. Instead, he “skimmed” The Wall Street Journal, ​ ​ ​ which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. He also listened to conservative talk radio, which is apparently less shrill.

This is a terrible way for any democratic citizen to act, and especially terrible for someone with the incredible honor and duty of sitting on our highest court. I read The Wall Street ​ Journal all the time. I read it critically, and I get frustrated with its pro-business slant, but I won’t ​ hide from it. I can’t take Fox News in large doses, but I visit their website once in a while. There ​ ​ are two reasons for this. First, I want to make sure I’m responding to what these conservative sources are actually saying, rather than what I expect or remember hearing. There’s a dangerous ​ ​ tendency for us to assume that we know what other people are saying — or would say — and therefore we use assumptions without going to the source.

The other reason I read conservative sources is because I don’t know everything, and my vision of the world isn’t perfect. There’s always another side to every issue, and even the sources

I do trust (like Democracy Now!) will occasionally leave things out of the conversation. Having ​ ​ ​ ​ an open mind means that you seek out different points of view and take them seriously. As ​ ​

132 Chinua Achebe said in his 1987 novel Anthills of the Savannah: “Whatever you are is never ​ ​ enough; you must find a way to accept something, however small, from the other to make you whole and to save you from the mortal sin of righteousness and extremism.” (Achebe’s profound insight is just one of the reasons I made the Wikipedia page about him into a Featured Article.)

Some people will insist that politics in school should be left to history classes and civics lessons, but I disagree. When students confront political matters only in isolated academic situations, they don’t get practice using the techniques of critical thinking in real-life situations.

Young people need to have real-world conversations with real-world participants of diverse backgrounds and points of view. Otherwise, political thinking quickly becomes enmeshed in stagnant circles of agreement or mindless repetition of meaningless phrases in the pursuit of a

“correct” answer.

The other danger of ignoring politics is simple: An apolitical classroom is one which reinforces the unjust status quo. I refuse to change the subject because I can’t. People are dying and suffering for no good reason, and I refuse to sit silently by while institutions of power cause such misery. Political prisoners are being tortured, and we can help stop it. Women and men are being oppressed, and we can take action against it. Children live in poverty, suffering from hunger and despair, and that’s wrong. War and violence continue to ruin lives around the world, and we can do things to change that reality.

Our lives are political in every aspect, because politics has infused itself into everything we do. The clothes you’re wearing were manufactured in a process that was deeply political.

They were probably made in a third-world sweatshop, just like the clothes I’m wearing. The computer on which I type these words — and the book (or e-reader) you’re now holding — was

133 made the same way. The fact that I have time to write this book is the result of political agitation, in the form of labor struggle which won the right to leisure time, which was eventually enshrined in Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The air we breathe is filled with particles (or kept clear of them) based on political decisions. Your job, my car, our food: All of these things have important political components. Life is not only a matter of politics, of course, ​ ​ but it’s absurd to believe that we can leave politics out of our lives.

Besides, that’s not a worthwhile goal to strive for. As Howard Zinn said in the title of his

1994 memoir: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” In other words, the status quo is pulling all of us in a particular direction — and refusing to take a side means you are, in effect, taking the side of the status quo. I refuse to accept the simplistic idea of “You’re either with us or against us”; as Obi-Wan Kenobi says in Star Wars Episode III: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” ​ ​ At the same time, however, we must recognize that our silence benefits the powerful. Those

Germans who quietly acquiesced to the rise of Nazi domination were wrong. Those white

Americans who refused to protest the institution of slavery were wrong. Those Ottomans who silently accepted the extermination of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks were wrong.

People call me naive and idealistic when I advocate for change, but I am neither. As

Emma Goldman said in a 1912 lecture: “Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled utopian.”

In fact, those cynical people who believe there’s no chance for positive change are the ones who are deluded. Such change isn’t easy, or quick, or automatic. It is not fun (well, not usually), it’s not entertaining, and it’s not profitable. Working for political change won’t bring you love (although I met my wife through political activism, so there are exceptions to every

134 rule) or friends or wealth. (Those of us working for change are often working for change, heh.)

But change can and does happen, so long as we’re willing to work to make it happen. As ​ ​ Frederick Douglass said in 1857: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”

I will discuss some political issues specifically related to education in the pages that follow, but first I want to renew my call for dialectic conversation, rather than debate. (For details, consult Teaching Commandment #7 in Chapter 3.) In his 2004 comedy album Never ​ Scared, Chris Rock said: ​ The whole country’s got a f---ed-up mentality. We all got a gang mentality [...] everybody is so busy wanting to be down with a gang: “I’m a conservative!” “I’m a liberal!” “I’m a conservative!” It’s bulls--t! Be a f---ing person. Listen. Let it swirl around ​ ​ your head. Then form your opinion. ​ ​

This is more or less the same thing George Washington said in his 1796 farewell address:

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”

Dialectic conversation is especially important in political discussions because it acknowledges (and encourages) the human capacity for change. It recognizes that our ideas and opinions and beliefs are not set in stone. (Grace Lee Boggs makes this point beautifully in the

2013 documentary film American Revolutionary.) Most of us believe what we’re taught as ​ ​ children, but we always have the power (and the responsibility) to consider things from other

135 points of view. When it’s clear that we can’t support our beliefs with good reasons, then we must change our beliefs. (We don’t want to be wishy-washy or lacking in principle, but neither should we be rigid or closed-minded.) Facilitating this process is a responsibility of the enlightened teacher.

One of the best techniques for facilitating dialectic conversations in the classroom is to ask questions. Too often, Americans have trouble discussing politics because we’re certain about where the other person is coming from, and we think they need to benefit from our (usually loud, insistent) opinions. But most often, I find that asking questions can more easily help us to arrive at the true heart of our differences, and allow for a more honest, open, and fruitful search for common ground.

Here’s a (relatively) silly example of dialectic conversation in action: I have a map of the

Earth in my classroom. After several weeks, someone will notice how I’ve hung it and ask:

“Hey! Why’s your map upside down?”

I ask: “How do you know it’s upside down?”

“The words are upside down,” the student says.

“Okay,” I say. “Suppose there were no words. Would the map still be upside down?”

Students always insist that such a map would still be upside-down, which then lets us analyze the tradition of drawing maps with north on top, and what the concepts of “up” and

“down” refer to anyway. At this point I like to say: “Up is a conceptual fiction. There’s no such thing as ‘up’; there’s only away from the Earth and toward the Earth.” Then I’ll pause for a moment of reflection and say: “Right?”

136 Part of my intention is to use humor and make things difficult for the sake of discussion.

But I’m not just “trolling”, as the kids say. There is a point to be made here, one about ​ ​ ​ ​ epistemology and perspective. Of course there’s no conspiracy among people in the northern hemisphere to oppress the south with cartography. On the other hand, our picture of the world is ​ affected by our pictures of the world. Most of us have seen the famous “Blue Marble” photograph of our planet, taken in 1972 by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft. Chances are, ​ ​ however, that you’ve seen an edited version of that photo, with the planet rotated 180 degrees, to ​ ​ fit our usual view of the planet. (In the original, Africa is “upside down”.)

As someone who has thought about these issues, and who knows about the original 1972

“Blue Marble” photo, I have a responsibility to elevate my students’ thinking in these realms.

But I also have a responsibility to avoid simply lecturing them: “Morons! North doesn’t always have to be up. The ‘Blue Marble’ photo was edited!” Dialectic conversations allow us to satisfy all of these requirements.

Situate your knowledge and check your privilege.

The first thing conscious educators need to do is understand the systems of power and oppression that function all around them. Recognize where you come from and what advantages

— tangible and intangible — come with those origins. Understand the traditions to which you belong, and strive to behave in ways that ennoble the spirit of your ancestors. Confront the limits of your experience and knowledge. Study the tendencies of privilege and work to fight them in your subconscious mind.

137 I work to recognize and combat my privilege. I can tick every box on the privilege bingo scorecard: I’m a well-to-do heterosexual white guy living in a quiet residential neighborhood. I have plenty to eat, a loving wife, and lots of video games (and time to enjoy them). The fact that

I have the time (and the chutzpah) to write this book is itself an indication of my privilege. ​ ​ There’s a lot of talk about privilege these days, and many folks seem to think it’s a way to silence discussion, or make people feel guilty. It’s never been those things for me; instead, it’s a way of recognizing what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledge”. Every person comes from a particular context, and some of us are born into contexts that bring certain benefits. If you win the lottery, you’ve got the privilege to quit your job. Being white gives me the privilege to not think about race, if I so choose. Being a guy gives me the privilege to not worry about being sexually assaulted or harassed online. And so on.

This puts me into every “solidarity” camp, and very few “personal experience” camps.

I’m a male feminist, a white anti-white-supremacist, an American internationalist, a materially comfortable opponent of capitalism, and an anarchist who bosses around 125 young people every day. As you can imagine, this has led to quite a bit of cognitive dissonance over the years. I must constantly balance where I’m from and where I want to go; long- and short-term thinking; and my own beliefs against the perspectives of others. (It’s tough for me to discuss feminism with a woman who opposes every feminist principle I hold dear. Ditto poor people who love capitalism.)

Still, we are one human family. Every division of race, gender, sexual preference, economic status, and social category is an artificial barrier between brothers and sisters.

Thousands of hatreds and prejudices and -isms threaten to separate us, but there is one love that

138 can unite us and help us evolve as a species. If nothing else, my life as a political educator is a quest to highlight the organizational methods of implementing that love for the human family.

I don’t like the simplistic thinking that usually comes with political labels, but as Cornel

West once said: “Categories are a compromise with chaos.” Therefore I’m willing to identify myself as a feminist, an anti-capitalist anarchist (mostly), an Afrocentric multiculturalist, and a nonviolent warrior for justice and freedom. I am also a supporter of LGBTQ liberation, someone who insists on rights for disabled people, and a vegetarian.

I am a revolutionary, because I’ve come to understand that adjusting the system (known as “reform-mongering”) is not enough. Revolutionary thinking says that we humans can do better that what we’ve already established, in our structures of organization. This mode of analysis reaches into every sphere of political thought: We can (and should) create a better economic system. We can (and should) reformulate our conceptions of gender and sexuality. We can (and should) change our thinking about race in transformational, systematic ways.

Because I am a thoughtful, philosophical revolutionary, I understand that not every system should be assaulted merely because it is a system. Conservatives understand that it’s much more difficult (and risky) to create an entirely new institution, than to preserve and improve the institutions that already exist. The job of the rigorous political intellectual is to figure out which systems are capable of reform and which must be transformed or abolished. It’s much easier to simply fling invective and shriek: “Tear it all down and start all over from scratch!” But that’s the political ideology of a nine-year-old. Adult revolutionaries must be more nuanced.

139 I will hasten to add the word nonviolent to the talk of revolution, because many people associate revolutionary thinking with violent insurrection. I seek to place myself, instead, in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King Jr. Rather than perpetuate cycles of retribution and vengeance, I want to help everyone find new ways of being in order to evolve our consciences and consciousness.

To this end, I consider teaching to be a radical political act. Not radical in the sense of storming the castle or overthrowing regimes, but radical in the sense of fundamentally transforming mindsets and abolishing the ignorance that gives oppression its legitimacy. I don’t force my political views on my students, of course. As Thich Nhat Hanh says in his 1993 book

Interbeing: “Do not force others, including children, by any means whatsoever, to adopt your ​ views, whether by authority, threat, money, propaganda, or even education. However, through compassionate dialogue, help others renounce fanaticism and narrow-mindedness.”

In this manner, I insist that my students examine their assumptions and prejudices: Why is “feminist” a dirty word? What does affirmative action really mean, who benefits most, and what are the alternatives? How should a decent society be organized? What are the good and bad things about capitalism? In this mode of Socratic questioning, I seek to jostle the worldviews of young people, just as mine was jostled. Although it can be unsettling at times, it is necessary to bring about the insight and motivation to pursue truth and justice, freedom and peace.

I will discuss some political issues (like race and international relations) more than others

(like feminism and class) in the following sections, mostly because they relate directly to topics in my classroom. Someday I’ll write a book about all of my political views, but for now I’ll stay focused on the links to education. You’re welcome.

140

Question authority, even your own.

People often cringe when I describe myself as an anarchist. There has been a conflation in the American imagination of anarchists with wild-eyed, hysterical bomb-throwing radicals. As with every stereotype, this conception persists because it contains a tiny sliver of truth; some anarchists do throw bombs, and property destruction is a modus operandi of many anarchists. (I ​ ​ don’t approve of property destruction, even though I will insist on distinguishing it from violence toward people or other living things, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

In a letter to his son Christopher in 1943, JRR Tolkien wrote: “My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs) […] The most improper job of any man […] is bossing other men.

Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.”

This crystallizes nicely why I am an anarchist. Put simply, I don’t need people telling me what to do. I’ve learned how to be a decent, intelligent, hardworking person who respects the rights of others and works to make the world a better place. I learned these things not through harsh punishment or bribery; I learned them from my loving parents, who nurtured me and set clear boundaries. I learned them from my awesome brother and my excellent friends, who helped me place myself in the world and understand who I am. I learned them from my indefatigable teachers, who taught me (along with literary analysis and geometry and French conjugations) how to be a responsible individual. I believe other people (including my students) can live good lives without anyone “bossing” them around.

141 Put simply, anarchism is a political view that says we don’t need rules and authority.

People can come together to rule their own lives without coercion or force. I will immediately point out that I am a 90% anarchist, because I believe some forms of authority and rules are necessary. (As with all things, I reject fundamentalism and orthodoxy.) The point, however, is that all forms of authority must be legitimated — the authority figure must prove its right (and need) to exist. The burden of proof is on people and institutions to legitimate their authority.

Anarchism prioritizes (and facilitates) voluntary associations, free from the violence and pressure so common to our lives. This is all well and good, of course, but my first week as a new teacher demonstrated instantly that it was simply impossible for me to be an anarchist educator.

Tell a room full of 17-year-old students that there’s no one forcing them to study gerunds and maybe three of them will do it. Allow students to leave the classroom if they prefer, and most of them will race for the exit.

Therefore some force and authoritarian policies are necessary in school. I tell the kids on

Day One that my classroom is not a democracy, and that I am in charge. I do this with force and ​ ​ ​ ​ conviction, because the healthy rebellious spirit that lives inside every teenager will usually manifest itself in foolish, unhealthy ways that benefit the students only in the very short term.

Responsible as I am for guiding young people toward enlightened long-term self-interest, I wear the cloak of authority with unease, but I wear it.

I would love to run my classroom is a free and open way, using only voluntary associations and reasoned conversation. I would love to abolish grades, rewards, and punishments from the room. I would love to deal with students directly, without involving

142 parents or administrators when a kid is unruly. I do these things as much as possible, but I can’t do them all the time.

Mostly, this is not my fault. Kids grow up with the principle of “because I said so”.

Therefore, by the time they reach me, they know very little else. I can either invest 58 iterations of patience and repetition, in the hope of eventually, gradually, and painfully moving them

1/16th of an inch toward a resolution of the conflict based on ideas and rational thought; or I can just keep going with the boundaries their first 16 years have established.

This is, of course, a vicious cycle. The more we teachers rely on force to make students do the work, the weaker and less-developed their internal systems of motivation become. As noted in above, my time at New College was glorious because its lack of grades allowed me to rekindle my own passion of authentic non-coercive learning. Alas, many young people don’t walk that same path (New College has a high attrition rate), and only a few of my high school students are able or willing to take advantage of the intellectual freedom I give them.

This is true in every class I teach — a few students are surly and defiant; most are passive and cooperative but not driven; and a few push themselves to go beyond the bare minimum. As

George Carlin said in his 1997 book Brain Droppings: “Most people work just hard enough not ​ ​ to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.” Even in the vaunted AP English class, most students are only willing to do what’s necessary to get the grade. They are addicted to cell phones like all teenagers, and they consult SparkNotes as a primary source. (AP English is a unique circumstance, because I am expected to use the Authority Stick liberally, in order to whip the kids into shape for the test. This flies flagrantly in the face of my anarchism, and I’ve always had trouble finding the balance.)

143 This business of legitimate authority in the classroom is important, but it’s also complicated, because authority must prove its legitimacy every time it is invoked. Just because I have the authority to stop a kid from leaving the classroom, does that mean I have the authority to force him to put his cell phone away? (It’s possible that he’s sending a joke to a friend, but it’s also possible that he’s getting a message from his mother about a loved one who has suddenly died.) Obviously we will drive ourselves crazy if we try to decide these things at every turn, but it saddens me to see how rarely some teachers consider the matter at all.

More to the point, it is the nature of authority to expand itself in the mind of the person wielding it. (I know from personal experience how tempting it is to flex my muscles of authority, even though I am ideologically — and theoretically — committed to free and voluntary associations.) In Erich Maria Remarque’s classic 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the ​ ​ soldier Kropp says: “As soon as they get a stripe or a star they become different men, just as though they'd swallowed concrete.” His comrade Katczinsky believes it is a problem central to human nature: “If you train a dog to eat potatoes and then afterwards put a piece of meat in front of him, he'll snap at it; it's his nature. And if you give a man a little bit of authority he behaves just the same way, he snaps at it too.” When Kropp reminds him that discipline is essential in wartime, Kat replies: “It may be so; still it oughtn't to become an abuse.” This line should remain burned into the memory of every conscious educator.

Fortunately — just as living in a world of free associations can help young people better adjust their own tendencies toward long-term enlightened self-interest — tempering authority with reason can also feed on itself. When we refrain from using blind authority, it becomes less necessary. Not all the time, of course; I’ve been burned many times by students mistaking my

144 goodwill and compassion for weakness. But far too many teachers make the opposite mistake of believing that every instance of their authority is always justified, in the name of discipline.

I should also point out that anarchism in the classroom sometimes conflicts with other progressive principles. If a student says something racist, for example, my belief in free speech and voluntary associations may be threatening my need to make the classroom a safe space for all students. Should I put the hammer down and insist that such statements will be met with immediate harsh punishment? Or should I try to engage the student with Socratic questions, and try to get him to see the error of his ways? It depends, of course, on what sort of language the kid is using, and how severely out of bounds his comments are.

I will also point out that anarchism is not simply a matter of freedom; it’s also focused on justice and equality. The boys in Lord of the Flies experience total freedom, but that’s not the ​ ​ world anarchists aspire to. In that story, Jack turns away from his responsibilities to other people.

This mindset of shared destiny is essential to the anarchist vision, and it is a mindset that is also encouraged by anarchist life. The more time we spend being coerced, the more we believe it’s the only way for humans to interact, and the natural outgrowths are greed, selfishness, and a death of empathy. But the more voluntary interactions we enjoy, the more drawn we are to that form of interaction. This generally leads to more awareness of others, and more willingness to combat injustice.

One last element of this discussion is the need for teachers to constantly separate what a student does from the essence of that student’s being. Just as dialectic conversation is essential because it recognizes the ability of people to grow and change, anarchist classrooms recognize

145 that a student who needed to be pushed in the right direction yesterday may not need that same push tomorrow.

In a fantastic 2008 video called “How To Tell People They Sound Racist” on his blog Ill ​ Doctrine, Jay Smooth explains the difference between discussing what someone does and who ​ ​ ​ someone is: ​ ​ The most important thing that you've got to do is to remember the difference between the “what they did” conversation and the “what they are” conversation. Those are two totally different conversations and you need to make sure you pick the right one.

The “what they did” conversation focuses strictly on the person's words and actions and explaining why what they did and what they said was unacceptable. [...] That's the conversation you want to have.

The “what they are” conversation, on the other hand, takes things one step further and uses what they did and what they said to draw conclusions about what kind of person they are. [...] This is the conversation you don't want to have, because that conversation ​ ​ takes us away from the facts of what they did and into speculation about their motives and intentions, and those are things you can only guess at, and can't ever prove, and that makes it too easy for them to derail your whole argument.

Many teachers waste time speculating on who a student is, which takes everyone’s attention away from what she did. If a student steps out of line, then the teacher has the legitimate authority to discipline her (assuming the offense was significant and the punishment fits the crime and etc etc). But going “one step further” accomplishes nothing, except for complicating matters, making the student shut down — probably increasing the likelihood of future defiance

— and probably damaging the teacher’s standing in the eyes of other students.

146

Learn the lessons of East Timor.

Most people have never heard of East Timor, but it’s an essential part of my life. Each semester, I take one day to tell each of my classes the story of East Timor. Although it is a tale of war, starvation, torture, murder, suffering, and bloodshed, it is also a story of hope, nonviolent resistance, and empowerment. Many students tell me it’s their favorite day of the semester.

I’ve been involved in East Timor solidarity for almost 20 years now. I met my wife through this work, and it has helped me understand the world and my place in it. I brought the

Wikipedia article “Indonesian Occupation of East Timor” to the status of Good Article — not as polished as a Featured Article, but still commended for its quality research and writing. (That article contains reliable sources for all of the information in this section.) Everyone should know the story of East Timor, because it reveals vital things about how the world really works — why why we must never settle for the blood-soaked pessimism of “realpolitik”. ​ ​ It is especially important for US citizens to know about East Timor, because it shatters some dangerous myths about US foreign policy and national intentions. It is also important for folks in the US, especially young people, because it demonstrates the power we have to fight suffering and combat injustice. As noted, many teenagers live in worlds of despair and frustration; some of the most important messages we can transmit to them are messages of hope.

Finally, the story of East Timor highlights the liberatory potential for writing, a point which I stress in all of my classes.

147 I will briefly tell that story here, for the same reasons I tell my students. Suffice to say that this is a severely truncated version of the story, and I encourage all readers to investigate it more fully on their own.

Timor is a tiny island located 400 miles northwest of Australia, at the eastern end of the

Indonesian archipelago. The western half of the island was a Dutch colony until 1945, when it became part of Indonesia. East Timor was a Portuguese colony for hundreds of years. Portugal exploited resources like coffee and sandalwood, but maintained a generally passive role. Major effects of the colonial period were the infusion of the Portuguese language, as well as conversion to Catholicism. Today, 90% of the population is Roman Catholic.

A 1974 coup in Portugal left East Timor with a power vacuum. The civil war that followed left several hundred people dead, and a left-leaning group called Fretilin declared an independent East Timor. Immediately, the Indonesian military — led by a dictator named

Suharto who had come to power in 1965 by killing half a million people — began to prepare an invasion. During these early maneuvers, in October 1975, an Australian television reporter named Greg Shackleton and his four-man crew were reporting on the conflict in East Timor; they were killed by Indonesian troops.

On 6 December 1975, US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger travelled to Jakarta, Indonesia, where they met with Suharto. During the meeting, Ford and

Kissinger promised Indonesia that the US would not stand in the way of an invasion of East

Timor. One person in the meeting said later that US officials “gave the green light” for the invasion. There was concern about the vast majority of Indonesia’s weapons coming from the

US, but the main worry was delaying the offensive until after Ford and Kissinger left.

148 The next day, 7 December, Indonesia invaded East Timor. Thousands of people were killed in the first weeks of the occupation, as the Indonesian military (TNI) began carrying out massive killing operations across the region. Rape was used as a method of torture and psychological terror. TNI soldiers spread out across the area, killing anyone suspected of belonging to Fretilin or other resistance organizations. 60,000 Timorese were killed in the first three months.

The United Nations did what it always does when one nation invades another: the general assembly passed a resolution condemning the invasion and demanding that Indonesia withdraw immediately. However, the US ambassador to the UN at the time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, worked to keep the UN from making this happen. In his 1980 memoir A Dangerous Place, he ​ ​ wrote:

[T]he United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook [with regard to the invasion of East Timor]. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with not inconsiderable success.

In addition to blocking effective action at the UN, the United States provided 90% of the weapons used during the invasion. As the killings continued, TNI troops were trained by US forces, and US diplomats urged the world to ignore the bloodshed taking place in the name of anti-communism.

Indonesian generals expected to conquer East Timor in a single day. The expression used by soldiers was: “Breakfast in Dili [in the north], lunch in Baucau [in the central region], dinner in Lospalos [on the east coast].” The Indonesian military did not count on the incredible determination and will to freedom of the East Timorese people.

149 For the next 24 years, the Indonesian military carried out a brutal occupation, exhibiting all the worst tendencies of military oppression. Torture of suspected resistance members was widespread. Those who escaped the island told of massacres and bloodshed on an unthinkable scale. Disappearances and mutilations were common. A small-scale guerrilla force fought in the mountains, but resistance in the cities was forced underground.

The TNI carried out enforced starvation programs, denying food as a means to erode support for independence. Sterilization campaigns were carried out, injecting women with

Depo-Provera. Migrants from various parts of Indonesia were encouraged to move to East

Timor, that they might dilute the native population.

By the late 1980s, Amnesty International reported that 200,000 East Timorese men, women, and children had been killed — roughly a third of the pre-invasion population. News of the bloodshed was trickling out of East Timor, but the global community failed to take any concrete steps toward ending it.

In October of 1991, a East Timorese student named Sebastião Gomes was killed by

Indonesian troops at the Motael Church in the capital city Dili. At this time, Portugal was preparing to send a parliamentary delegation to East Timor, in order to assess the situation there.

The delegation was thwarted by the Indonesian military, but a number of foreign journalists — including Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn from the US — had traveled to East Timor to document the trip.

Sebastião’s funeral took place on 12 November 1991. Seeing the presence of foreign journalists as a chance to get their message out to the world, members of the funeral procession

150 began to wave flags and unfurl banners supporting independence. At the Santa Cruz Cemetery, the people held occupied Timor’s first-ever public protest against the Indonesian occupation.

Unfortunately, the TNI responded as it so often did: with violence. Indonesian troops approached the unarmed protesters with M16s drawn and opened fire. Over 200 people were killed in the cemetery that day, and another 200 were reportedly murdered in hospitals and other locations after being detained.

When Allan Nairn and Amy Goodman saw the soldiers approaching, they attempted to stand in the way, holding aloft their US passports as a warning. The soldiers attacked them, fracturing Nairn's skull and badly wounding Goodman. Meanwhile, British cameraman Max

Stahl videotaped the massacre, hiding the tape inside a grave and smuggling it out later under the cover of night.

News of the massacre — especially the first-hand accounts from Nairn and Goodman, supplemented by Stahl’s footage, which can be viewed online by those with strong stomachs — shocked the world and revealed the hideous reality of life in occupied East Timor. (The Timorese explained that such atrocities were not isolated incidents, as Indonesian officials claimed. The ​ ​ only difference this time was the presence of cameras.) Within months, activists in the United

States began to organize a group called The East Timor Action Network/US (ETAN), while ​ ​ activists in dozens of other countries did likewise.

Throughout the ‘90s, ETAN worked with the courageous people of East Timor to force

Indonesia to end its bloody occupation. ETAN’s primary goal was ending US support for this gruesome atrocity. Members lobbied Congress through mail and in person; a newsletter helped to share news and information; and new chapters sprang up all over the country. I organized the

151 Florida chapter, while my future wife — whom I did not meet until 1997 — was busy in

Wisconsin doing similar work.

This activity was overwhelmingly successful: Congress put an end to training programs, arms sales were stopped, and a proposed sale of F-16 planes to Indonesia was the focus of such criticism that Indonesia eventually withdrew its offer. ETAN continued to call for a referendum for East Timor, and pressured Congress to pass resolutions calling for the same.

In 1996, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Bishop Carlos Belo and José

Ramos-Horta, two activists from East Timor, for their unwavering efforts toward a peaceful resolution to the bloodshed. This award renewed world attention to the plight of East Timor, and many activists around the world felt a renewed sense of hope.

After General Suharto was forced out of office by massive protests in Indonesia, his successor BJ Habibie announced that the “pebble in our shoe,” East Timor, would be allowed to vote in a UN-sponsored referendum in August 1999. This was seen as a great victory for the people of East Timor.

Unfortunately, Indonesia also insisted on being in charge of security for the vote. Some international observers approved of the idea, suggesting that the changing government of

Indonesia needed a chance to prove its honorable intentions. But the TNI organized militia groups around East Timor, who began to terrorize the population and instill fear of retribution if the vote called for independence. Militia leaders promised to destroy the country; one boasted that “the streets will run red with blood”.

In the shadow of these threats, the International Federation for East Timor established an

Observer Project, whose mission was to monitor and report on the conditions in East Timor,

152 universally acknowledged to be far from free and/or fair. (My wife was one such observer. I served in California as a US coordinator for the IFET Observer Project.) In April 1999, 200 people were killed at a church in Liquiça by an anti-independence militia group. Harassment, threats, and other acts of violence were reported all over the country.

Still, the Timorese people knew they would probably never get another chance to raise their voices, so the vote took place on 30 August 1999. The response was overwhelming: 95% of the registered population went to the polls, and 78.5% voted for independence.

Immediately after the results were announced, the TNI made good on its threats; a new shockwave of violence tore through East Timor. International journalists fled, and the UN threatened to pull its staff out. (A few courageous workers and journalists — including Marie

Colvin, who lost an eye in Sri Lanka and was killed in Syria in 2012 — insisted on staying in the

Dili compound, a site of refuge for hundreds of terrified Timorese.) IFET was forced out, and fear rippled across the region. Thousands were killed.

At this time, the US refused to pressure Indonesia to call off its dogs of war. President

Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, was asked by a reporter if we had an obligation to act on behalf of East Timor, given our recent action in Kosovo. He said in response:

“[My daughter] has a very messy apartment up in college. Maybe I shouldn't intervene to have that cleaned up.”

When the smoke cleared, thousands of East Timorese had been killed, and the country had been devastated. 70% of the buildings in Dili had been burned to the ground. The TNI eventually allowed a multinational peacekeeping force onto the island, and Indonesian soldiers finally left East Timor.

153 After a short period of UN rule, East Timor declared its independence for a second time on 20 May 2002. The US solidarity community turned its attention to helping the Timorese rebuild their devastated country. Some people moved to Timor and helped to organize a group called La’o Hamutuk (Walking Together). Others — like a group in Wisconsin with which I ​ ​ ​ ​ work — created sister-city alliances to explore forms of mutual benefit and uplift.

Today East Timor is a very peaceful country, but also very poor. It is the poorest country in Asia, and one of the poorest in the world. Diseases like malaria ravage the population, and health care is almost nonexistent. Our group works with Dr. Dan Murphy, a native of Iowa who has been working tirelessly in East Timor for decades.

When I first got involved in East Timor solidarity work, some of my friends ridiculed my naive enthusiasm for the cause. “That’s how the world works,” they told me with cynical smiles.

“You can’t stop the US war machine.” But they were wrong, and I told them so. Those of us who believed in peace and justice had a responsibility to take a stand. We did, and it worked. The people of East Timor won.

The story of East Timor is ultimately one of hope, but it’s also one of nonviolent resistance. The leadership understood that they could not win an armed struggle against the

Indonesian military, backed as it was by US weaponry and hardware. (Meanwhile, the Timorese resistance received no aid from China or Russia, evaporating the myth of communist affiliation.)

More to the point, however, people in East Timor understood — like those in South Africa — that nonviolent resistance offered a chance to transform their horrible situation, rather than merely shuffle the people in positions of power.

154 I was very lucky to be involved in the struggle to free East Timor. I have learned powerful things about courage, determination, and mercy from the Timorese people I have met and worked beside. This work has given me an unshakable faith in the power of ordinary people to make change happen.

That change can take place in ways both large and small. Early in my involvement with

East Timor activism, I met Allan Nairn, one of the journalists present at the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre. He had continued to investigate human rights in East Timor and Indonesia, and spoke on many occasions with Indonesian military officials. He told me that he was told by one such official that if they had a Timorese person in custody (usually being tortured) and they received one letter from a person outside the country, the Indonesian military would not kill the prisoner. ​ Amnesty International is, of course, organized around this same principle of letter-writing as a weapon to combat torture and political imprisonment. I am proud to sponsor a chapter of AI at the school where I teach.

The victory in East Timor happened for many reasons, including simple good fortune.

Many movements for freedom and peace are not successful. (Tibet continues to suffer under the brutal rule of Chinese violence, and Israel continues to occupy land seized illegally in 1967.)

Still, the history of East Timor reminds us that change can happen when ordinary people care ​ ​ enough to make it happen. This story proves the lie of every slacker shrugging his shoulders and ​ ​ claiming we can’t do anything about the world.

Remember Tony Robinson.

155 In March 2015, a young black man named Tony Robinson was shot and killed by a white police officer named Matt Kenny in the city where I live. Kenny had been called to an apartment where Robinson was allegedly assaulting people he knew. Toxicology reports later said

Robinson had several drugs in his system, including Xanax, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and marijuana. When Kenny entered the apartment, he said Robinson punched him repeatedly, and he worried that he might be knocked unconscious. Kenny shot Robinson seven times, killing him.

Turns out Robinson went to the high school where I teach. I never had him in a class, but

I had students who knew him. And the more I heard about him, the more he sounded like a lot of the students I’ve taught over the years. Although he was never my student, I feel a certain connection to his life and circumstance.

Tony Robinson was killed during a year of angry protests over police killings of other unarmed black people. Fury was still simmering over the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson eight months earlier, as well as the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland in November

2014 and the December decision not to indict the officer who killed Eric Garner in New York.

With the chorus of “Black Lives Matter”, these protests ignited a firestorm of debate over how police departments across the country relate to communities of color, and especially

African-Americans. (The protests have continued as more evidence of police misconduct has come to light, especially related to the deaths of Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and Sandra Bland.)

I could discuss a thousand different aspects of the Tony Robinson case and the Black

Lives Matter movement. I’ll try to focus on how these things relate to the classroom, but I have to confess that this is difficult for me. There are many layers of pain and difficulty in these

156 discussions, and we have to recognize that our humanity and natural empathy for all humans makes it hard (as well it should) to think about these matters in simple ways.

The recent wave of police killings of unarmed black people is nothing new. The LA Riots happened in 1992 after four police officers were cleared of all charges in the Rodney King beating. I took to the streets in 1996 after police officers in St. Petersburg Florida killed TyRon

Lewis. I remember the outrage I felt in 1997 when Malik Jones was killed in upstate New York.

I’ve read books by members of the Black Panther Party, describing the horrific brutality that led them to take up arms against state violence. I’ve studied government programs like

COINTELPRO, dedicated to crushing movements for black empowerment. I’ve heard lectures from witnesses to the 1969 killing of Fred Hampton in Chicago. As the sign in my classroom says: “I’m not cynical; I’ve been taking notes.” Those of us who have been fighting for justice in black America are not surprised by the pattern of police killing unarmed black people; we are saddened and outraged when it continues, and — even more frustrating — when white America refuses to acknowledge the pattern.

On the Monday after Tony Robinson was killed, I was eager to discuss the incident with my students. I’ve discussed police brutality frequently over the years, especially during

Interdisciplinary Poetics and in other classes pursuant to the study of texts like To Kill a ​ Mockingbird and A Raisin in the Sun. When we write about regrets in our Creative Writing ​ ​ ​ journals, I read to the students about how I regret not walking out of class as a high school student to protest the Rodney King verdicts. I felt like Tony Robinson’s death would allow us (or force us, perhaps) to discuss a topic which often feels abstract and remote.

157 Much to my surprise (and sadness), most students didn’t want to discuss it. We had some good exchanges in the morning, but after second hour the students shut down. I think some of them were worn out; there had been a lot of conversations on social media, and by the end of the ​ ​ school day I could tell that some students were simply bored of hearing the same points debated over and over. Others were probably feeling drained from the pain involved in such conversations, especially if they knew Robinson or felt a kinship with him because of race or other factors.

As coordinator for our school’s chapter of Amnesty International, I was eager to discuss the incident during our weekly Thursday meeting in the context of international law and human rights. Our school requires administration approval of all signs posted in the hallways, however, so the signs I made on Sunday had to get the okay from our principal. She called me into her office on Wednesday and explained how she was uncomfortable having Robinson’s picture on the poster, and wondered if we needed to use his name. I made another sign, sans photo, which ​ ​ she approved, but it only had a few hours of display time, and brought zero new people to our meeting. I discussed the incident with the five regular AI members, but I had hoped to bring more people into the conversation. I kept the signs up for another week, but the results were the same on the following Thursday.

I was (and continue to be) frustrated that so few students wanted to discuss this incident, just as I am frustrated by many students’ lack of political awareness in general. (I have the same frustrations with Americans as a whole, and indeed most humans.) I feel a desperate urgency when discussing the Dakota Access Pipeline, the phenomenon of hydraulic fracturing, and the

158 rise of high-frequency trading. Most people, however, have no idea what these things are, and I can do nothing except rant and rave.

I have no desire to rehash the killing of Tony Robinson, or deconstruct the facts of the case. On the other hand, I want to address several points related to his death, especially as they pertain to our lives as educators.

First among these is the fact of Mr. Robinson’s use of drugs. We teachers need to stop pretending as if this is a bizarre aberration, or even uncommon. We all ingest drugs every day — caffeine, acetaminophen, sugar, television, etc etc. In the last few decades, we’ve seen an enormous rise in the use of pharmaceuticals to treat a variety of maladies, especially those of the mind. (As the PBS Frontline documentary film Medicating Kids points out, one of the primary ​ ​ reasons for the US government’s classification of ADHD as a recognized medical condition was intense lobbying from pharmaceutical companies.) We have a responsibility to speak with young people about mind-altering substances in ways that are honest and open, without engaging in fear-mongering or oversimplification.

The truth is that many young people experiment with drugs of various kinds, legal and illegal. And I daresay that when a well-to-do white kid has a bad trip at the college dorms or frat houses in my city, the cops don’t go busting in with guns drawn. More important to our realities as teachers, however, is the likelihood that half-truths and shame will probably not deter young people from experimenting with illicit substances, and may even push them further into clouds of oblivion.

The truth is that people take drugs because they’re trying to escape from things. I take naproxen when I have a bad headache (which happens about once a week during the school

159 year), because I want to escape from the pain. I drink coffee in the morning because I want to escape from slumber’s mental sluggishness. I play video games because I am addicted, and because they allow me to escape into a world where I can be a hero and vanquish concrete virtual monsters (as opposed to the abstract monsters of apathy and ignorance I fight constantly in the classroom).

We can’t know why Tony Robinson took tetrahydrocannabinol and benzodiazepine, but

I’ve spoken to many students who have, and usually it’s because they’re wrestling with serious pain in their lives. Almost every time, when I notice a student is living in a cloud or exhibiting signs of substance use, I go on to learn that s/he is trying to escape from some kind of trauma. I share my concerns with counsellors and parents, but usually they’re already aware of the problem. Sometimes students who are self-medicating will commit suicide, or cut themselves, or do other nihilistic things. Drug use tends to be the symptom, rather than the disease.

Which doesn’t change the fact that using illegal narcotics is stupid. Using drugs to escape from our problems usually just makes them worse. The last thing I want to do is apologize for young people who ingest harmful substances or do other dumb things. But I want to warn teachers and other adults that draconian reactions to young people who make bad decisions will likely exacerbate already chaotic mental landscapes, and could potentially make things worse.

In classical tragedies like Macbeth, Oedipus Rex, and Things Fall Apart, we find a ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ triumvirate of causes: Fate, society, and self. In Tony Robinson’s case, we might leave aside the question of fate and examine police force, but there’s no denying that he made some bad decisions. One year earlier, he pleaded guilty to armed robbery after a home invasion during which he helped steal a video game console and a television. Returning to the distinction made

160 by Jay Smooth between what a person does and who a person is, however, it’s important that we ​ ​ ​ ​ remember that no one can be reduced to the worst thing they’ve ever done. Heaven knows I ​ don’t want to be seen that way, and I expect you don’t either. As Tavis Smiley says: “Some of us ​ ​ should not be the sum of us.” (This line took on a sad irony when he was dropped from PBS in ​ ​ 2017 for creating a hostile and oppressive work environment.)

When we look at his Facebook posts and comments from loved ones, we can tell that

Tony Robinson was trying to escape from something. At one point he wrote online: “I hate my mind”; another time he wrote: “My soul is dying.” Court documents record a history of anxiety and depression. As a biracial person, he struggled to find his place in a society riven by racial binaries. His uncle told CNN: “A lot of his identity was formed because of his racial ambiguity.

[Tony] felt a misfit most of his life.”

Many young people have trouble fitting in, and I’ve watched dozens of students wrestle violently with the kinds of frustration Tony felt. If you’re a teacher, you’ve had students like this too — whether you realize it or not. As the saying goes: “Be kind always. Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” We educators have a responsibility to help students who are dealing with these struggles; maybe not explicitly (although if you’re open and kind, students will probably seek your aid at some point), but in our demeanor and bearing. This is especially true when we consider institutional racism; if you don’t attack your unconscious bias, you might be treating black or biracial or latino students differently without even realizing it.

I’ve been fortunate to work closely with a few students who have been dealing with serious trauma in their lives — of all different backgrounds. In some cases they have thanked me for helping them deal with the chaos and find ways to persevere. Those are the most precious

161 notes I have ever received, and there is no more important service we teachers can perform for young people.

Our community has not finished learning from — and reacting to — the death of Tony

Robinson, even though the District Attorney sadly chose not to charge Officer Kenny with excessive force. In addition to demanding an end to police brutality and mass incarceration, I hope that we educators can do more to help students like Tony.

Recognize that what’s good for you is often good for students.

It goes without saying that schools and classrooms must be designed around what’s good for kids. Or it should go without saying. Those who support business-model education “reform” ​ ​ have manipulated political language in a clever way by presenting a false choice between

“What’s good for students” and “What’s good for teachers”. By endlessly repeating the mantra

“We need to do what’s best for kids”, they have put actual educators on the defensive. It makes us sound like we’re not interested in what’s best for kids. ​ ​ But of course this is a false division. First of all, if we didn’t care about what’s best for kids, most of us wouldn’t be educators. I certainly don’t come to school for the free photocopies or fat paycheck. We don’t ask firefighters to sacrifice everything they deserve in the name of

“what’s good for people trapped in burning buildings”, do we? If we paid firefighters minimum wage, we could hire twice as many, and then we could save more people. Right? No; we understand that firefighters are courageous, dedicated individuals who sacrifice daily to help their communities.

162 The business-model “reform” movement has hoodwinked American society into thinking differently about teachers. In Wisconsin it’s reached a fever pitch with Scott Walker’s insidious assault on teachers — and not just our unions (although that’s been a huge target). You can’t win a war on teachers’ unions without planting the idea in public consciousness that teachers are untrustworthy, and that their unions work primarily for negative ends. So while these advocates of “reform” must declare their love for both public education and teachers themselves, their proposals and policies suggest that they have only contempt for us.

Meanwhile — and this is essential — they never discuss the deep conflict between what ​ ​ is good for students and what is good for private wealth. No one can argue that some teachers are motivated by the wrong ideals and have no passion for education. Unions sometimes do defend ​ ​ these lackluster educators at the expense of helping kids. But private companies regularly make ​ ​ decisions to benefit their own bottom line, at the expense of the public. The BP/Deepwater

Horizon catastrophe in 2010 is a good example, as is Shell’s support for the Nigerian government’s human rights violations against the Ogoni people.

This is not to say, of course, that business can’t do some things better than government.

On the other hand, the overhead costs for government are usually much lower than those for the much-celebrated private sector. The Congressional Budget Office says that Medicare administrative costs are around 2%, while private-sector Medicare Advantage plans usually spend 11% on administration. My point is that business must make a profit. Anything that gets in ​ ​ the way of this is up for grabs. (Sometimes companies will sacrifice profits in the short term for positive PR and beneficial branding, of course.)

163 So — just as everyone has situated knowledge and personal perspectives that affect our understanding of various issues — everyone also has potential conflicts of interest. Still, for the most part, what’s good for teachers is what’s good for kids. ​ ​ Healthy teachers without mountains of stress eating their minds are obviously better for kids. Smaller classes are better for kids. More access to technology and books and supplies is better for kids. Efficient and responsive maintenance and secretarial workers are better for kids.

These things cost money, and we forget their value at the peril of learning.

Even the dreaded tenure protections that most people ridicule or attack among educators are beneficial for kids. Why? Because young minds need access to controversial materials, guided by knowledgeable and courageous educators. If our jobs are endangered every time we put forward something to which some individual might potentially object (even if 99% of the community supports us), then we’re much less likely to lead our students into the choppy waters necessary for deep intellectual rigor.

Besides, tenure is merely the establishment of a due process when a teacher’s job is on the line. While most districts don’t fire teachers for no reason, we shouldn’t have to trust and hope that this will continue to be the case. No worker should have to rely on such hope, which is ​ ​ why all workers deserve strong collective representation, in accordance with International Labor

Organization standards.

Killing tenure and opening the profession to anyone who will work for minimum wage is a quick way to cut costs. But it’s not good for kids, because we get what we pay for. Wall Street ​ ​ apologists insist that we cannot restrain the outrageous compensation packages of executives like

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein — who made $24 million in 2017 — because they have to

164 recruit (and retain) the best minds in America. (This is also how they woo brilliant engineers and scientists from elite colleges and universities. The 2011 film Margin Call explores this ​ ​ phenomenon.) Somehow, though, this same thinking is tossed aside by most pundits discussing education, even while they insist that nothing is more important than the minds of young people.

The false choice between what’s good for kids and what’s good for teachers usually flares up when budgets get cut. Schools and districts are forced to choose among the most cost-effective means of helping young people, and this is compounded by a rabid fanatical ​ fixation on test scores. While it’s true that cheap options that are best for students occasionally clash with cheap options that are best for teachers, the reason for these budget cuts in the first place is always set aside. “There’s nothing we can do about that,” we’re told. “We just have to do more with less.”

But I refuse to accept that answer. Would we accept that answer when the Veterans’

Administration is underfunded? Should we? If our local fire departments didn’t have enough money to repair fire trucks, would we tell them “You’ll just have to do more with less”? Of course not. And neither should we accept a false choice because we refuse to properly fund education in the United States.

165 8. Writing liberates.

“The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is that of freeing the mind.”

Antonio Gramsci Avanti (1916) ​

I’ve been lucky to teach writing classes for most of my career. Sometimes academic but mostly creative, these classes have allowed me to lead young people toward liberation of the mind through the written word. As a result I have gleaned a few insights that are particularly useful for those who teach writing. I hope the following pages will also be valuable to teachers of other subjects, but I can’t promise anything.

The most important thing you can give students in a writing class is inspiration. The second most important thing you can give them is guidance. The third thing is freedom.

Many writing teachers get this twisted — they think students mostly (or only) need freedom, and it will lead them to discover the magic of the craft. As someone who spent 30 years teaching himself how to write, and 18 years teaching others what I know, I can promise you that this miraculous epiphany doesn’t happen. Instead, the student is mired in a perpetual slog through mediocrity and self-delusion, until s/he learns (usually after many many years) that something different must be tried.

The truth of the matter is that, if freedom and time were the only things required for the development of good writers, we’d see high schoolers with quality novels (or even stories) completed during their summer vacations. But we don’t — I’ve seen exactly two in 18 years.

Even my most dedicated writing students need more. I know the demands of adolescence force

166 many students to spend their time doing other things, and of course we teachers have a solemn obligation to provide inspiration to young people. That’s why it’s number one in my list. The banner in my classroom reads “Writing Liberates” because it is a motto by which I live.

But it is a fool’s error (and a trick of the ego) to believe that students don’t need direction. Some of my students don’t understand why quotation marks around dialogue help the reader. These students lack the fundamentals to make their stories comprehensible. And before you start demanding that I not pollute the minds of young Cormac McCarthys or Ntozake

Shanges, please know that I expect people to demonstrate their mastery of the rules before they start breaking them.

Even the motivated students who read a lot and know the basics of writing need guidance and direction — indeed, they’re usually the most hungry for it. The most common complaint I get from my advanced writers is that I’m not giving them enough specific direction. Of course this is because, after a certain point, there’s no roadmap for how it’s done. You just have to give it a shot and revise and edit and try again. Having a knowledgeable guide can be vital, but it becomes less vital with each page written.

Direct Instruction (DI) is essential for helping young writers get better. DI was a blasphemous concept for many years in education, because some of the research said students learn best when they come to understanding on their own. As always, this research was used by

“reformers” to silence anything that didn’t obey it. DI isn’t hated quite so much these days, but many teachers still get nervous at the idea of directly telling students how to do a thing.

The reason for doing so, however, is quite simple: The world of a student isn’t very big.

A decade and a half on the planet isn’t much time, and most students haven’t seen much of the

167 world. Obviously this varies from student to student; some have traveled to Timbuktu and back.

Most haven’t been out of the country, however, with the occasional exception of those who celebrate spring break in Cabo San Lucas. I hesitate to even call this leaving the country, but I digress.

We teachers — even writing teachers — have to get comfortable with the fact that we’ve seen and done and read things that students need to know about. Of course we can’t be obstinate or haughty because of our knowledge, and every writer must develop his own voice based on what he considers good writing. But we teachers must not shrink from our responsibility to guide students in the right direction. Often this happens because our egos aren’t strong enough (“They probably don’t care about my advice”) or because we aren’t sure what to tell them (“I’m not a professional writer, so what can I even say?”).

I’m lucky as a writing teacher, because I’ve been writing for a long time, and I’ve had the quality of my writing affirmed by professionals. But even if you haven’t, you have useful things to share. If not, share advice from professional writers and/or your teaching colleagues — and in the meantime, start writing! Every writing teacher should write constantly in her free time, because it’s the foundation of the craft. (“Read a lot, write a lot”, as Stephen King says.) If you aren’t willing to write a lot, then how can you require it of your students?

Just as a lack of confidence is the biggest shortcoming I see in my students, insufficient confidence will suffocate a writing teacher too. I believe that we simply cannot teach others to do what we cannot do ourselves (or have not done in the past). This doesn’t have to be a direct relationship; I don’t write sonnets or pindaric odes, but I can direct a young poet in the craft of verse because I have written — and studied — poetry.

168 I also believe it’s essential for writing teachers to share their writing with the class. For one thing, this breaks down false barricades of educator superiority (or inferiority), and proves that no one is immune from the dangers of being on stage. Teachers who share their writing also make connections with students through the creative process itself; not just assessments of it.

I’ve been told not to share my writing, from both directions. Some professors insist that ​ ​ amateur writing doesn’t deserve a special place in the creative writing classroom. We should stick to showcasing the work of respected authors from the canon, they say, and — if necessary

— popular professional writers with whom the students are familiar.

On the other hand, I’ve heard professional educators declare that teachers should not share their writing with students, because it is bound to be better than anything the young people can create. It will therefore intimidate and stifle young writers, they claim, by making them feel inadequate.

Both of these perspectives are absurd, or at least wildly insufficient. Advice from well-known modern and classical writers is obviously valuable, and a CW classroom without ​ professional advice is severely crippled. (I discuss some favorites below.) Equally, skilled writers who teach CW classes should avoid dangerous ego trips in the guise of sharing. But students need to hear — and read — great writing from people who can explain (in person) how it came into being.

I tell the students about how I started writing my first novel — a fantasy epic like those from my favorite authors, Roger Zelazny and David Eddings — at the age of 12. I tell them about how I finished it in high school and threw it away because it was so terrible. I tell them about how I saved a few pages to remind myself of how far I had come. I tell them about

169 rewriting the first novel, and then writing my second novel, and then writing the third in the trilogy. I tell them about writing short stories and handing photocopies to my friends. I tell them about going to Taco Bell at midnight because I wasn’t getting any writing done at home, and then somehow blazing through ten pages in two hours despite (or perhaps because of) the horrible ‘80s pop metal music on the radio. I tell them about self-publishing my book of short stories and doing my first book reading. I tell them about the frustrations of getting published, and the joys of appearing in literary magazines and the English Journal. I tell them about my ​ ​ situated knowledge as a writer, and they appreciate this unique perspective.

It’s one thing to lead students through creative processes, which every teacher does every day. But it’s another to show them how I have done it, with asides and tangents and humorous ​ ​ anecdotes. If students are intimidated by anything, it’s the foreign element of daunting enormity that looms over the craft of writing. When we break down our own process, we help young people understand that it’s merely a human skill or putting one word down after another. We ignore this human pathway at our peril.

Focus on the fundamentals.

I’m always shocked at how little most students know about writing at the start of the class, especially a Creative Writing class. Using a new paragraph for every speaker is often a foreign concept. Narration skips from past to present and back again with every other sentence.

People and locations are described with minimal or no detail, and the action happens at bizarre paces. Some of this, naturally, is the result of rushed and/or sloppy work that we see in every

170 class at every school. But much of it is the result of never learning the basics, and not reading much.

Every generation bemoans the lack of intellectual sophistication of the generation that comes after it. Still, I find that people today — not just young people, but especially them — are suffering (especially with regard to writing) because they don’t read much. Time is obviously a problem, but I’m shocked by how many people in my writing classes brag about how they never read because “it’s boring”. Of course such students are usually in the class only because they need an English credit and they figure Creative Writing is their easiest option. (They are wrong.)

I always tell them: “If you think books are boring, you haven’t found the right books yet.”

But even if reading is boring to you (well, not you, probably, since you’re reading a book), there is no way to overstate the importance of reading, especially for those who want to write well. Books open doors to new galaxies, both fictional and here in the “real” world. They provide perspective, insight, and depth that cannot be found in other media. I won’t belabor the point, except to say that the most intelligent people I know read lots of books all the time. The dumbest people I know don’t ever read books.

I insist that my writing students read, but I don’t assign them specific books. They get plenty of that in their other English classes, and we barely have enough time for all the writing we need to do. I tell them to find a book and read it. I do book checks and give some time for reading in class, but mostly I want them to reconnect with that little kid who used to read for fun.

Usually this doesn’t work, and I don’t want to paint an unrealistic picture of how much my students read. Those who do, however, soon see the link between their reading and their writing.

171 Another urgent task for teachers is to make writing fun again. The demands of academic writing tend to make students hate it. One of the best things about teaching a writing class is that you get to do fun kinds, taking the pressure off and getting students to smile — and even laugh

— when they’re attacking an enjoyable assignment.

Your easiest approach here is the pass-around story. Write a sentence on the board like

“The spaceship landed slowly on Main Street.” Have the students copy it down and start telling the story however they like. Give them ten minutes, and have them switch with the person beside them. Give them ten more minutes and switch again. The third person brings the story to a close.

They love seeing where their classmates take their original ideas, and they love being part of someone else’s narrative. (Have each author put their name at the top when they get the paper.)

I start every class period with Journal Writing; this is another way to make writing fun again. My students get two different topics each day: one fiction, one non-fiction. They have ten minutes to write about either topic (or something else, if they prefer). They can write poetry, or a letter to a friend, or make a list of plans for the weekend. They can’t do homework for other classes or doodle; they must write. This gives them the freedom to explore the kinds of writing they enjoy, and it also inspires them to try out ideas and formats they wouldn’t otherwise explore.

Many kids start doodling after five minutes, and some don’t write at all. But most of my students find that they are learning essential things about their writing voices, and they usually come to enjoy the daily ritual as well. This can contribute to a positive feedback loop, whereby they feel themselves get stronger, so they like it more, and they want to do it more, so they do it

172 more effectively, and so on. Few things make me happier than watching a passionate young person scribble furiously to finish a story after I’ve called time.

Very few students respond to the fiction prompts, but those who do attack them with enthusiasm. Each semester I’ll have at least one student who writes only fiction. Sometimes no ​ ​ one in the whole class will write fiction (no one will confess, at least), but it’s still important to ​ ​ offer it, because you never know.

Okay, so the students are inspired and having fun and ready for direction. What kind of direction should you give them? Start with the basics — paragraphs, quote marks, tenses. Help them create complex characters, perhaps with the “20 Questions” included below. Have them eavesdrop on people to figure out how humans actually speak. (This is invaluable for writing good dialogue.) Have them share their favorite first sentences, and share a few of your favorites.

Remember that their world is tiny and they haven’t read many first sentences. Those who have probably haven’t paid close attention to them. Teach them the basics of the story arc. Demand constantly that they include more significant details.

You must also get them to develop their metacognition: How do they feel about their writing? What are they good at, and what do they want to work on? This is difficult, because our

American school systems aren’t interested in students’ perspectives on their own learning. We tend to subscribe to the “banking method” described by Paulo Freire, where the kid is a vessel to be filled by the teacher. (Insisting that this is not how we’re supposed to teach has, ironically, ​ ​ become a cliché of those people working hardest to making it happen.)

Students often don’t enjoy dealing with these things, because they’re used to classes where the teacher says “Do this”. They do it and they get an A. That’s how a class is supposed to

173 work. So when a teacher like me says “Well, what do you want to work on?” they’re often not sure how to respond.

But no good writer ever improved without considering her own progress along the way.

A good writer knows if his dialogue is clunky. A pro can sense awkward sentences, and certainly such things will stick out during the re-reading phase. I’ve only rarely been able to get students to read their work carefully before turning it in, in every class I’ve ever taught. We can force it, but it doesn’t carry over to non-forced situations. Even my most advanced literature students who have been through the process a million times still believe that their work is good enough as soon as the first draft is finished.

A little prep work can go a long way here. Before discussing a story or assignment with the students, have them reflect on the process. What are they proudest of, and what do they want the most feedback on? Again, I don’t want to oversell this; many students will write that they are proud of “nothing” or “everything” and ask for feedback on “whatever”. But those who develop a sense of their own compass alignments will take advantage of this opportunity.

Once a student understands that her advancement as a writer is in her own hands, something changes. Some of the anxiety drops away and the teacher is able to step back and let her fly. Of course it’s usually replaced by all new anxieties, and the teacher should stick around for the inevitable crash landing, but that’s just part of the process. This can be a bittersweet moment for the writing teacher (as it is for all teachers): We like to feel indispensable, and while we say we want students to ascend to a place where they don’t need us anymore, there’s a part of ​ ​ us that feels sad when they actually do.

174 On the other hand, helping a student reach this higher plateau means that you can have even more rewarding discussions with them about the craft. Some of my most advanced students working with me on independent study projects have watched their work time evaporate as we debate the merits of storytelling techniques in TV shows, novels, and movies. This is one of the most excellent benefits to working with older students.

And if you’ve taught them well, you’ll enjoy years of well-crafted correspondence with these students once they’ve flown the nest of your classroom.

Be honest and encouraging.

You may recall that Commandment 10 in Chapter 3 is “Thou shalt not lie to students, or break your promises.” This need for us to be honest can sometimes clash with our need to be supportive and encouraging, especially in a class where creativity is at the center. If I really believe that a student has written a horrible story, or wasted the reader’s time, how can I respond in a way that is neither cruel nor dishonest?

Obviously, this predicament calls for tact and compassion, and must be handled with great care. I refuse to play the game that I see from so many writing teachers (and teachers of art and music and other subjects), wherein the teacher offers constant uncritical praise to the students, seeking only to bolster their confidence. For one thing, we’re supposed to help these writers get better at writing. Confidence matters, but content matters too. The world does not need more swarms of untalented young people forcing their mediocrity on unsuspecting readers, because no one ever demanded better. Flannery O’Connor was supposedly asked if she believed

175 the universities were stifling young writers. Her response was: “I don’t think they stifle enough of them.” (There’s no source for this story, but it’s too good to leave out.)

Besides, constant uncritical praise is dishonest — or at least incomplete. If nothing else, I am one reader of the student’s work, and I owe them an honest critique of the words on the page.

I won’t help them by being vicious, but neither will I help them by being Pollyanna or mindlessly supportive.

One technique I have come to rely on is the “critique sandwich”: something positive on top, a suggestion for improvement in the middle, and another positive comment to finish. Young writers need praise, but they also need some specific guidance for what to look for on the next story or assignment. And it should go without saying that praise should also be specific; vague generalities do nothing except stroke the student’s ego, and there’s a crucial difference between confidence and ego. Confidence is a vital ingredient in the soup of creativity. The ego, meanwhile, is the enemy of excellence.

Another part of this puzzle is the interplay between honest critique and encouragement. A note of praise is ten times more powerful if it follows previous comments about what needs work. My favorite bit of feedback to put on student writing is: “Your dialogue has really improved and become more authentic” or “The pacing in your scenes has gotten much smoother”. If you only ever provide feel-good pleasantries, then how can your students gain a sense of meaningful growth?

There’s also a need for writing teachers to be supportive even when the writing isn’t great. Every student is unique, and what might be harsh but fair for one kid might be devastating for another. As soon as possible, we must figure out where each student is on the path, so we can

176 measure the proper balance of honesty and encouragement. I don’t believe in the cruel methods of some excellence-expecting teachers, who dish out the harsh feedback because they know the kids will later thank them for helping them improve. Usually a student who is really struggling needs support rather than acidic critique.

This also works the other way. No writer (even, I imagine, Stephen King or JK Rowling or Toni Morrison) ever outgrows their desire for positive feedback, but my advanced students let me know that they prefer I spend my time giving more specific suggestions for improvement instead of dreaming up new superlatives to describe their work. I’ve had many students say things like “Be as critical as you can”; this is tough for me, but I give them my honest opinion — especially when they ask for it.

The most difficult feedback to give relates to the existence of the work itself. How do we get students to write stories that matter? Why does this story need to exist? Do we really need ​ ​ another teenage vampire story, or anime-inspired tale of a kid with one angel parent and one demon parent? Many students write stories that are just fun or exciting, or scary, or funny, and that’s fine. The world needs clowns, as the saying goes, and giving someone a good laugh (or a good scare) can be just as essential as reminding them of their shared humanity. But we are plagued as a civilization with mediocre stories (books, movies, shows, games, and songs) that provide nothing beyond mere entertainment, aspiring only to a basic kind of formulaic regurgitation. The genius of William Shakespeare and Toni Morrison and Bill Watterson is that they deliver entertaining stories that make audiences smile and wince, while also reflecting on ​ ​ our shared humanity and pointing to the tragic beauty of existence.

177 This is tricky for young writers, because originality is difficult to cultivate, and all artists imitate their idols. I sure did, and there’s no doubt that the first drafts of my fantasy novels did not produce anything important that hadn’t been done before by more skilled writers. Students ​ don’t need to be chastised for writing derivative work, when that’s a necessary part of every young creative person’s journey. Still, we can plant the seed of narrative importance.

Obviously, too, there are many reasons why a story may be worthwhile; perhaps the core concept is not original — Shakespeare’s never were — but a new wrinkle might develop when the pieces are combined in new ways. Or maybe the language is particularly thought-provoking

(as with Toni Morrison). Or maybe the character introspection is deep and meaningful (as with

Bill Watterson). If we are going to encourage that students write things that matter, we have to be open to all the different ways that can happen.

The same is true, if not more so, for essay writing. Who on the planet could possibly develop an original thesis about Romeo & Juliet? No one, that’s who. So forget trying to inspire ​ ​ original thinking, and get them to figure out what stands out to them. Which character is most ​ ​ like their parent or best friend? Which song(s) come to mind when they read the verse? Which lines are most important and why? Getting students to go deep into these core concepts of analytical thought are much more important than the endless fixation on comma placement that we see in many writing classes.

When a writer reaches the point (as we eventually do) where it becomes necessary to mix more substance into our work, we tend to see a mouse-trap snap into deep brooding ruminations on how bleak everything is. But we should remember that Hamlet follows his ode to Yorick with a joke about how stinky the corpse is. Important does not — should not — mean humorless, and

178 in fact the best way to make a potent emotional statement is to bring your reader from the silly to the sublime. As Bill Hicks once said: “You have to walk the audience to the cliff.”

These balancing acts can be agonizing for young writers, and this is another important area for the writing teacher to offer guidance and feedback.

Rekindle a love of poetry.

Children love poetry. They can’t get enough. Mother Goose, Dr. Seuss, nursery rhymes, silly songs: these things are the magic beans of childhood. We plant them and climb the beanstalks. As kids, we memorize limericks and make up crazy rhymes to taunt our friends.

Poetry is a deep part of every child’s life.

Then school comes along and says “Read this poem. Tell me what it means.” The kid gives it a try and the school says “Wrong. You fail.” And we wonder why teenagers hate poetry. ​ ​ ​ ​ But, of course, they don’t hate poetry. Teenagers love poetry. They listen to it all day ​ ​ every day. But they don’t think of it as poetry. They memorize hundreds of examples of metaphor and internal rhyme, but they don’t have the language to break it all down and apply the concepts to what they love.

One of the most important jobs for a writing teacher, therefore, is to link their past and present love of poetry to the academic world that seems so foreign. I start by asking the students what comes to mind when they think of poetry. Lots of people shout “boring” and “confusing”, while a few courageous kids will say “beautiful” or “synecdoche”. This allows us all to situate

179 our relationship to poetry without judgment or assumption. I urge them to keep an open mind and recognize that there’s a universe of poetry out there, of which they’ve only seen a tiny slice.

I put out collections of poems and encourage the kids to browse. They can look online too, but prepare some websites ahead of time. Otherwise they’ll likely find dreadful verse from mediocre minds and pollute the room with those simplistic trifles. Remind the students that poetry is highly subjective; allow them to decide what they like about the pieces that stand out to them. Ask them to pick a favorite line, examples of figurative language, and strong imagery. You can make a little worksheet for this, or have them write a paragraph about it.

Do not, however, contribute to student hatred for poetry in your writing class by ​ ​ analyzing poetry to death. They get plenty of this in their other English classes, and a writing curriculum should be more focused on creating than analysis. The number one reason students tell me they hate poetry is because they always feel like they don’t “get it”. Too many teachers insist there’s only one right way to read a poem, and if the student doesn’t pick out certain specific elements, then they fail at poetry. Just open the door and ask them to describe the sunset.

Besides, if you rekindle their love affair with verse, the students will analyze it plenty on their own. Just look at how much time and effort we all spend digging through the lyrics of our favorite songs.

Pick a few of your favorite poems and read them to the class. I love to start my poetry unit with William Carlos Williams’ “This is just to say” poem about the plums. A few love it, some hate it, and most are just baffled. But it lets us talk about specific words like “icebox”, and the tone of the piece. I can explain how I relate to the poem, and then I show them the version I made to send my wife, after I ate the raspberries she had grown in her garden. One of the most

180 important things a teacher can do is spread the infection of a love of the subject, and this is arguably more important for poetry than any other part of the English curriculum. As Khalil

Gibran said: “Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.”

If you want to make poetry fun again, spend a day writing haiku. It’s quick, it’s easy for most students, and it can lead to some laughter around the room. One of the best sights in the world is seeing a room full of young people carefully counting syllables. (Some teenagers are embarrassed by counting on their fingers, but they need to get over it.) Tell them to write a haiku using dialogue from (and, if necessary, description about) a popular movie. (I wrote one about

The Princess Bride: “Inconceivable! / I’m Inigo Montoya / As you wish, princess”.) Do the same ​ for TV shows, song lyrics, your school, and your city. The kids can write what they know in an unusual format that requires creative thinking. Remind them to use the same syllable-manipulation tricks that Shakespeare loved so much: Remove a syllable with an apostrophe, so that water becomes wa’er, and add interjections when a line is one syllable short ​ ​ ​ ​ — he used “O” a lot, while modern poets prefer “yo”.

Finally, after your students write some longer, more serious poems — I usually assign three, with specific topics for two of them — hold an open mic so the courageous few can get up and read. You’ll get surprise excellence from that quiet kid who never speaks in class, and I’m always floored by how supportive they are. (Your mileage may vary.) It’s a great way to bring these works to life and build classroom community.

Grading poetry from students can be tricky. I was once a substitute teacher for a woman who had very strict grading policies for poetry in her class, and when I assigned scores that were

181 too high for her taste, she re-graded everything and added comments such as “I feel like you didn’t try very hard on this.” I refuse to give points based on vague feelings.

Instead, I require a minimum length for each poem, and a few elements that must be included: specific details, figurative language, and unusual words. My advanced students must incorporate wordplay and internal rhyme. I make them color-code or format these elements for easy tracking when it’s time to assign scores.

As a result, there’s nothing subjective about their grades. (We can squabble about which words count as “unusual”, remembering however that it’s a contextual concept; what’s common for one student might be unusual for another.) But we don’t have a room full of automatic “A”s just because each turned in something. ​ ​ Poetry is tough. Anybody who has tried to write serious verse knows how uniquely challenging it is. It’s unlikely that your class will create poets who don’t already burn with the passion. But you can encourage those who do, and you can get everybody else to hate it a little less. After two decades of trying, I think that’s the best we can do.

Explore great resources for writers.

I’m always looking for advice on writing from professionals, as much for myself as for my students. Sometimes I’ll find an interview or an essay that really resonates with me, only to see it fall flat with the kids. (This is the way of all teaching, of course.) The ten items below have proven themselves to be important to me and well-received by my writing classes.

182 Some teachers will follow advice from professional writers with a quiz or “exit card”, but

I usually keep points out of it. I just want them to consider where these writers are coming from, without feeling pressured to get the “right” interpretation or dig out something valuable enough to get credit. Sometimes students will ignore what professional writers say, but those students usually don’t do well in the class anyway.

There are too many items to create a comprehensive list, but here is a smattering of my favorites.

1. Nelson Algren: Nonconformity. This is the one exception to the rule; students don’t ​ ​ ​ enjoy this book, but I keep trying to push it on my more motivated writers. Algren, best

known for writing about heroin addicts and other folks on the bottom rungs of society in

novels like The Man with the Golden Arm, insists that writers have a responsibility to go ​ ​ beyond mere entertainment. We must, he says, speak up and stand up with those who

have been thrown away by the rest of the world. He mixes in a beautiful reflection of our

culture as a whole, and makes some alarming statements about what American literature

is. Along the way he drops some lines that refuse to leave the reader’s head. My favorite

was made into a bookmark one year by my Secret Santa: “A certain ruthlessness and a

sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed

robbery.”

2. Edwidge Danticat: “Women Like Us”. Haiti has given the world many wonderful ​ things, but when it comes to literature we’re hard-pressed to find a more valuable export

than Danticat’s writing. Her novels and stories blend the pain and heartache of that

country’s violent history, without wallowing in despair. I once heard her speak at the

183 Wisconsin Book Festival, sandwiched awkwardly between regional authors who wrote

about skinny-dipping teenagers and young folks working mildly unsatisfying summer

jobs. (It was a truly bizarre juxtaposition.) In this tiny epilogue to her story collection

Krik? Krak!, Danticat challenges us to consider writing as a dangerous political act: “In ​ our world, writers are tortured and killed if they are men. Called lying whores, then raped

and killed, if they are women.” This is a bit heady for most students, but some of them

appreciate her deep meaning. Meanwhile, she uses lyrical language to remind us of the

obligations that come with picking up a pen: “You learned in school that you have

pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.” We

might consider a 21st century analogue with the cobalt in our cell phones and computers.

3. Natalie Goldberg: Writing Down the Bones. In a text that blends my interest in zen with ​ ​ ​ my desire to help new writers, Goldberg offers austere but engaging advice about how to

approach the blank page with mindfulness. She insists that we perpetually become

beginners and let the freedom of unburdened thought let loose our best first drafts.

There’s some touchy-feely fluff here, but mostly she provides interesting thoughts about

different ways to get the words down. Much of her advice will seem like common sense,

but it’s important because we tend to forget it — especially when we’re surrounded by

the hurleyburley of teenage life.

4. Stephen King: On Writing. More than any other single text, this is the writing book ​ ​ ​ recommended in the 21st century by professional and amateur writers alike. It’s loved

most for the “CV” section, in which King recounts all the intriguing — and painful, and

humorous — events that made him the writer he is. But the second half is also engaging

184 and worthwhile, delving as it does into specifics of language and character and why good

writers shouldn’t bother with outlines. (I disagree, but that’s a discussion for another

time. Terry Brooks gives an excellent refutation in his 2003 book Sometimes the Magic ​ Works.) We read the whole thing in my Creative Writing II class, and while some of the ​ students get exhausted toward the end, it’s dense with excellent advice. For example, he

constantly exhorts the reader to also read Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. ​ ​ Therefore I don’t have to bother including it on this list.

5. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “The Danger of a Single Story” (TED Talk). The ​ nonprofit organization TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) has given the world

a glorious treasure with its archive of fascinating 20-minute talks by people from all

walks of life, all free and easy to access online. The length and variety of these

presentations make them easy to include in the classroom, and Adichie’s talk is a superb

example of the best TED has to offer. She discusses the pitfalls of telling (and hearing)

just one story about people: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with

stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.” She points out that

she is guilty of this tendency as well; she offers concrete examples from her life of how

she has been essentialized, and how she has essentialized others. Her talk is important,

entertaining, and very funny.

6. Sarah Kay: “If I Should Have a Daughter” (TED Talk). Perhaps the favorite of this ​ list among the students is Sarah Kay’s electric 2011 spoken-word autobiographical

slam-talk about life, memory, war, and poetry. Part of this is because of Kay’s youth at

the time (she was not much older than my high school students), but mostly it’s her

185 willingness to take risks with imagery and language. She breaks down the three steps of

her journey as a poet — I can, I will, and I must keep evolving — while demanding that

young people resist the temptation to hide from the world in the name of protection or

being “cool”. She shares stories about her own youth, finding a supportive community,

and working with students. Along the way she shares silly jokes and two original poems

that excite the students and reach across boundaries.

7. Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics. This is the best book I’ve ever read about art, ​ ​ ​ but to be fair, I haven’t read many books about art. Most relevant for writers is the

chapter in which McCloud describes “a path of six steps” that all artists walk, in every

medium: Idea/Purpose, Form, Idiom, Structure, Craft, and Surface. This is an important

conceptual framework for inspiring metacognition, and my students read this chapter at

the start of every Creative Writing class. It’s a bit advanced for some kids, but for the

motivated students, it puts into words (and pictures) some things they’ve thought about

for a while.

8. Conversations with Maya Angelou. Few American writers have led a more storied or ​ ​ diverse life than Dr. Angelou, who was an author, poet, actor, journalist, singer, dancer,

professor, and activist. In this 1989 collection, Jeffrey M. Elliot gathers several decades

of interviews from various places. Angelou reflects on her childhood, visiting Africa, the

power of language, the responsibility of writers, and her own creative process. My

favorite quote is about facing the blank page, regardless of where the writer is — or has

been: “I always feel that I’ve just started. The work to be, the work that’s yet to come …

it will remain there, to be done, no matter what happens. If the reviews of a play of mine

186 are the best in the world, my work remains to be done. If a book of mine wins all the

prizes in the world, the work remains to be done.” We skip around when we read these

excerpts, but it’s a big collection with lots to pick from.

9. Eddie Stone: Donald Writes No More. The literary beginnings of the Detroit noir writer ​ ​ ​ Donald Goines are as unconventional as they come. Addicted to heroin and trapped in a

cycle of crime and incarceration, he wrote his first novel Whoreson in prison after finding ​ ​ inspiration in Iceberg Slim’s 1971 memoir. Stone’s book is unpolished but gripping, and

it introduces students to a writer from a world very different from their own — or, in

some cases, disturbingly similar. Goines’ story is not cheerful or upbeat (he was

murdered while sitting at his typewriter), but writing was an important way for him to

break the cycle of crime, communicate with the world, and tell stories that need to be

told.

10. Andrew Stanton: “The Keys to a Great Story” (TED Talk). This talk from the Pixar ​ screenwriter and director starts with an inappropriate joke (the punchline of which I

censor live by muting the bad word), but it shares some intriguing insights from one of

the most important film studios in the world. Stanton discusses the thinking behind key

moments in Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Wall-E, along with memorable events from his ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ youth and favorite movies. He also emphasizes the principle of “Show, don’t tell” with

what he calls “the unifying theory of two plus two”: make the audience do some work,

instead of just handing them “four”. Clips from movies by Pixar and others are sprinkled

liberally throughout, keeping students visually engaged alongside the talk itself.

187

Don’t ignore the jumper cables.

One last thing from Stephen King before we move on. In the autobiography section of On ​ Writing, he describes his attempt to write stories while teaching high-school English: ​ The bigger deal was that, for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was ​ ​ the teaching. I liked my coworkers and loved the kids—even the Beavis and Butt-Head types in Living with English could be interesting—but by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I’d spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain. If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then. I could see myself thirty years on, wearing the same shabby tweed coats with patches on the elbows, potbelly rolling over my Gap khakis from too much beer. I’d have a cigarette cough from too many packs of Pall Malls, thicker glasses, more dandruff, and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk. If asked what I did in my spare time, I’d tell people I was writing a book—what else does any self-respecting creative-writing teacher do with his or her ​ ​ spare time?

I don’t drink much, and I don’t smoke, but the rest of this description is pretty spot-on for me. In my case it’s only three unfinished manuscripts, but who’s counting? The most important part of this passage, however, is the bit about the jumper cables. This is an excellent reflection of the mental and emotional life of the American teacher. As with Tim O’Brien and Paul Rieckhoff and

Kayla Williams when they write about their experiences in war, the most popular writer of our time has drawn from his short time in the classroom to give us an important glimpse into its impact.

The other shocking thing about the passage is the prepositional phrase “for the first time”.

That’s right — the author of The Stand and The Dark Tower and Carrie and dozens of other ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​

188 well-crafted novels did not find the process difficult until he began teaching. It’s evidence of not only the intense mental pressure to which we teachers are subjected, but also an explanation for why so many of us teachers struggle with extracurricular creative endeavors. I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot, but I wonder how much more I could get done if my brain weren’t fried from the insanity of the classroom. It can be discouraging to see people with the freedom to devote themselves entirely (or even 50% of their time) to writing, rewriting, and self-promotion, while I delay my personal creativity in order to spend my Sundays reading piles of stories from students, most of whom don’t even care about improving their prose.

Fortunately, I find that writing can be an antidote of sorts to the jumper cables. Of course it’s more work, and therefore I usually save it for weekends and the summer. But writing does ​ liberate, and I’ve saved myself from plenty of pity parties by telling someone else’s story and discovering their modes of self-preservation. I haven’t written the story about the plucky, energetic English teacher yet, but I reckon it’s on the horizon somewhere.

Ask questions to create characters.

Over the course of my one-semester creative writing class, each student creates a character and writes about her/him/it in a variety of contexts (in a store, having an important conversation, etc). This allows them to learn about their characters and see what makes them tick.

To get them started, the students write responses (two sentences minimum) to each of the following questions. They cover a variety of domains — social, familial, psychological, and

189 spiritual. I once had this method confirmed by a professional author at a writing workshop, which made me happy. Some students add to the imaginative process by conducting an actual interview with their character: Where did you meet? What was s/he drinking? What did s/he wear? How did s/he sit and respond? And so on.

I try to grade these quickly, so the students can have them for reference on future assignments. I also insist that they cannot leave any answers blank, or give silly responses like

“My character isn’t afraid of anything!”

1. What is your character’s full name? How old is s/he? What does s/he do for a living?

2. What is a typical day like for your character?

3. What time does s/he wake up, and how? What’s the first thing s/he does in the morning?

4. What is her/his favorite food and why? What memory is connected to this food

5. Which object does s/he treasure most and why?

6. Describe his/her fingernails. How does s/he style his/her hair? What kind of clothes does

s/he wear?

7. Who is her/his best friend? How did they meet?

8. How did s/he obtain the shoes s/he’s currently wearing? How much did they cost?

9. What is s/he afraid of?

10. What is her/his greatest achievement in life so far?

11. What makes her/him angry? How does s/he deal with this anger?

12. What makes her/him happy? How does s/he act differently when s/he is happy?

13. When was the last time s/he threw up and why?

190 14. What is her/his earliest memory? Provide some details! (Sights, sounds, flavors, textures,

etc.)

15. How religious is s/he? Is s/he Christian? Muslim? Jewish? Atheist? Other? Explain.

16. Where and with whom does your character live? How hard is it for them to pay the bills?

17. Describe her/his family. How do they get along? Explain.

18. What is a secret s/he keeps?

19. Would you win or lose in a fight against your character? Explain.

20. What percentage of your character is based on you? Explain.

Use good prompts to get students writing.

I make my students write for ten minutes every day at the start of class. To get better results, I keep an archive of different topics to keep things interesting. Some work better than others, and some work better for some students than others. (Football players usually aren’t ​ ​ effusive about shoes, for example.) It’s healthy to use a wide variety, so that everyone is catered to at some point. What follows is a list of 60 topics that have been fairly successful for me. Feel free to use them or adapt at will. (And remember: If you ask the students to tell you about an embarrassing moment, you have to tell them about one of yours.)

Non-Fiction

1. What are the top ten mistakes (or bad habits) of teachers?

2. What are the top ten mistakes (or bad habits) of students?

191 3. What is your favorite game, sport, or leisure activity? When was your first time playing/doing it? Describe the feeling of winning and/or losing this game.

4. What is your dream car (real or imagined)? Describe its features and draw a diagram.

5. Write about your pet(s). Where did your pet’s name come from? Give some physical, emotional, and behavioral details. If you have no pets, what animal would you like to have for a pet and why?

6. What is your favorite kind of music? Who are your favorite bands, artists, MC, singers, and composers? What are your top ten favorite songs of all time?

7. What is your favorite part of nature? Give details! Tell a story about an experience you’ve had in the great outdoors.

8. Draw your brain and label its parts, based on what you think about the most. Then write about your brain — do you think better in the morning, or at night? Does your brain generally cooperate, or do its own thing? Are you friends or enemies with your brain? Explain.

9. What’s your favorite article of clothing? (A type of clothing, like jeans, perhaps; or — even better — a specific t-shirt or baseball cap.) Why is it important? Describe its appearance and explain its sentimental value.

10. Write about love and romance. What do you look for in a significant other? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the relationships you see around you -- parents, friends, coworkers, etc. What is required for a healthy relationship?

11. What kind of world do you want to live in? What is your vision of a better world? Explain. Be specific. Address society, economics, culture, work, environment, and family.

12. What’s the worst movie you’ve ever seen? What made it so bad? Give details! Make a list of the worst films you’ve seen.

192 13. What’s your favorite movie? Quote some dialogue and explain which character is your favorite (and why). List a favorite in each category (drama, comedy, horror, documentary, etc).

14. What’s your earliest memory? Give details — sights, sounds, smells, flavors, and textures.

15. What are you angry about? (Perhaps you want to address some small irritations, or serious reasons for major fury.)

16. What makes you happy? Make a list. Include big things and small things and medium-sized things. Include abstract items and concrete.

17. What is your favorite food? Make a list or explain something you love to eat. What do you enjoy cooking? Who is the best cook you know? What is your favorite restaurant and why?

18. If you could be in a movie, which would you be in? If someone made a movie of your life, what would it be like? (Would it be a comedy, a drama, or some other genre?) Who would play you, and who would play the supporting roles? Which songs would play during the opening and closing credits?

19. Write about money. Do you have enough? Too little? Too much? How do you get money, and what do you do with it? How do you feel about the US economy and the world economic system?

20. What do you want? (There are many ways for students to interpret this one; I like to let them answer it however they like.)

21. What has been the best day of your life so far? Give details!

22. Describe your morning routine. How do you get up in the morning, and at what time? What do you eat for breakfast? What kind of cereal? How do you get to school? Give details!

193 23. When I’m a parent… (What will you do differently from your own parents? What will you do the same way? What are some things a good parent does, and what are some things a good parent should never do?)

24. Write about your first time doing a thing -- riding a bike, driving a car, tasting your favorite food, cooking a meal, tying your shoes, kissing a boy/girl, etc. Give details!

25. Make a list of your favorite words. Include big fancy words as well as tiny simple words. Include slanguage and words/phrases in languages other than English.

26. What are you addicted to? (Legal things only, please -- television, cell phone, video games, shopping, etc) How does this addiction make you feel, and how does it affect the people around you in negative ways?

27. Tell us a funny joke. If you don’t know any clean jokes, describe something funny that happened to you, or something amusing from a movie or TV show.

28. Describe a strange person you’ve met. Give details!

29. Write about an embarrassing moment from your life. Give details — who were you with? What happened? How did you react at the time? How do you feel about it now?

30. Write about your hair. Does it cooperate, or does it fight you? How do you like your current hairstyle? What’s the most adventurous hairstyle you’ve ever worn? Who has the best hair of anyone you know? Which celebrity has excellent hair?

Fiction

1. Characters: A cheeseburger and a bag of fries. Setting: A dumpster at noon.

2. Write a story about two strangers talking on an airplane. (No terrorists allowed.)

3. “Now I have to go home and wash my arm!”

4. “I’m an anchovy and you have to catch me.”

194 5. The sun was setting. We were a long way from home.

6. Fred the Bug was having a bad day.

7. Write a story about someone digging through the trash.

8. “Hey, yo — I want my money back!”

9. The day had finally arrived.

10. “Dude, there’s no such thing as Algebron.”

11. Write a story about a man with a talking face on his stomach, preparing for a date.

12. “I just had the weirdest dream about you.”

13. Write a story about someone living without electricity.

14. The sky was unhappy.

15. Write about three children who find something they’re not supposed to see.

16. Write a story about two cats shopping in Paris.

17. Pick an object in the room you’re currently in, and write a story from its perspective.

18. “Okay,” the coach said. “There’s eleven seconds left on the clock.”

19. Write about the worst day in the life of an auto mechanic.

20. On the third day without her cell phone, Kendra starting going into withdrawal.

21. Characters: Sophia, age 72 and Mike, age 14. Setting: A meadow at sunrise.

22. “Hey! These aren’t my sunglasses!”

23. “Do you remember that guy we saw that one time?”

24. Write about Vel Panid, the elf warrior, setting off to confront a demon lizard beast.

25. Zhen counted down the seconds until the secondary explosions hit.

26. Juan-Tomas has to arrest someone for a crime he knows the man didn’t commit.

195 27. Write a story about someone wearing two shirts and only one shoe.

28. It was another boring day in Mr. Smith’s English class, when suddenly...

29. “That’s a recipe for disaster.”

30. Write about a character’s first kiss.

196 9. Build on what you love.

“The hip hop nation is wonderful. Surely there are those who would demonize this group of young people, but they are only doing what our ancestors have always done: used what they have to get where they need to go.”

Nikki Giovanni RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture (2008) ​

Late one evening in 2006 I was switching off the television after watching a movie with my wife. Before I could do so, however, I caught a tiny snippet of an interview with some professor of education, discussing how best to engage with students in the 21st century. He said something to the effect of: “Hip-hop is the most important cultural phenomenon of our time, and if education can’t recognize this and use it meaningfully, then we’re missing a vital tool in the classroom.” I realized in that moment that I should create a class about the intersections of hip-hop and literature. I stayed up all night writing proposals and outlining curriculum, using the

“power standards” that were in vogue at the time. Over the next six months, I worked tirelessly to get the class approved, and within a year it was listed in our course catalogue.

The satirical newspaper The Onion once ridiculed the oblivious, inauthentic teacher’s ​ ​ attempt to link the worlds of literature and hip-hop with an article headlined “Shakespeare Was,

Like, The Ultimate Rapper”. It beautifully mocks the way many teachers drop slang into their discourse, without knowing the first thing about the subject they’re trying to bring inside.

(“Shakespeare had the tightest flow in the history of the English language.”) It’s a cliché that teachers (especially English teachers) make fools of themselves by trying to act cool and using the latest slanguage, and the cliché remains popular because it’s true. Many teachers (myself included, from time to time) become insufferable in their dorkiness, which they try to turn into

197 suave nonchalance. In my graduate school classes, I became known as the guy who loved hip-hop. My classmates teased me about my potential to fit this stereotype, and warned me not to rely on hip-hop as the only way to reach young people. They were right, of course, but when I began teaching, I realized that — as with video games and science fiction — sharing a love of something with a student can create a powerful bridge.

Creating a class about hip-hop required careful precision with both literature and rap music. If I didn’t sculpt the curriculum with a sharp eye toward intellectual achievement, my department and school board would shut it down. If I didn’t bring an authentic voice and expansive knowledge of the music and culture, the students would ignore me.

I called the class “Interdisciplinary Poetics: Hip-Hop 101”. I figured a sophisticated, polysyllabic name would help ease its passage. I also designed a permission slip for the course, making sure parents understand that the class occasionally treads into adult themes — we use radio edits whenever possible, but some songs include explicit lyrics — while assuring them that we always explore those themes with conscious intelligence and severe prudence.

When I proposed the course to the English department at my school, they responded with enthusiasm. They supported me throughout the process, for which I am eternally grateful. I’m blessed to work in a school that values educational innovation, and the same goes double for our

English department. At one point the department chair said: “We’re happy to support this class because you’re the one who designed it.” Her faith in my skill was humbling to say the least. I was also fortunate enough to receive the early support of the Assistant District Administrator.

The school board was generally supportive, but one member dissented with harsh criticism. She pointed to the plague of violent misogyny in rap lyrics, and opposed the creation

198 of a class focused on music with such questionable lyrics. I told her that I agreed completely with her distaste for such lyrics, and in fact wanted to confront that retrograde content head-on. I explained my belief that open discussion was the best way to expand the minds of young people who may not recognize the problems in the music they love. I described the many other things that hip-hop is (and can be). I pointed to items in the syllabus about gender issues (including work from feminist hip-hop scholars like Gwendolyn D. Pough, bell hooks, and Tricia Rose), and I assured her that the history of hip-hop in my class would feature full inclusion of women

(who are often left out). She was unconvinced and cast the only opposing vote. I was disappointed by what I saw as nothing more than miscommunication. I invited her to visit the class once it began, but she never did.

The local newspaper went further in their opposition to the class, with an editorial headlined: “Don’t like English? Take rap class!” It wildly mischaracterized the course, making it sound like something that avoided scholarly rigor: “We think more constructive uses of time for electives could be found in not only teaching the classics, but also requiring students to read.” As if reading weren’t an essential part of the class. I wrote a reply (which they printed) in which I explained that simply listening to funky music would not be the entire class. I would use the music as a starting point to more advanced poetics concepts like meter and conceit. Along the way, we would flex our analytical muscles and expand our linguistic horizons. Fortunately, most of the people I spoke to in the community were amused by the newspaper’s oblivious attitude.

The experience of creating this class confirmed what I have always believed about truly excellent teaching: You must build on what you love, and find ways to build powerful bridges of meaning from the student’s world to your own. Failure to do this will make you into a robotic,

199 listless zombie, slogging through lessons that are lukewarm at best. A willingness to incorporate your passions and intellectual love life into your classroom offers you a chance to make the class both meaningful and interesting. Students are desperate for these elements.

Adding classes to a school seems like a simple matter — give students more choice, and everybody wins. But it’s more complicated in reality. For one thing, you must attract a certain number of students, or the class won’t exist. New classes sometimes do well and sometimes don’t, for many different reasons. Given the unusual nature of Interdisciplinary Poetics, we expected to get a decent-sized group, but nothing was certain.

The other key factor is section numbers. If 200 students sign up for American Literature, at an average class size of 25 students, the school needs to plan for eight sections. A school might make do with only seven, which bumps the average class size to 29. Or, if the school recognizes the value of small class sizes, they might offer nine sections, which puts only 22 students in each class. When it comes to figuring out who will teach what, the number of sections — and the variety of classes on offer — is central.

Interdisciplinary Poetics attracted enough students for one section, making it something of a “boutique” class. It was strong enough to continue, but its small size made scheduling more difficult for everyone else. (This is why more options in the course list makes life more complicated for teachers.) As the course has become an institution at our school, its popularity has grown, especially when students recommend it to their peers.

In this section I will discuss some specifics of the Interdisciplinary Poetics course, as an object lesson in how I crafted something new from my lifelong love of the music. It’s been one

200 of the most satisfying parts of my career as an educator. I hope these reflections can inspire other teachers to take similar risks — and enjoy similar rewards.

Start with the words.

We begin each class period with “Daily Lyrical Analysis” (DLA). This serves as an enjoyable — and valuable — routine to begin when the bell rings (an important method in effective teaching, similar to the Journal Writing in my Creative Writing classes). I select a track and print copies of the lyrics. The students read along while we listen to the track, highlighting interesting or important lines. Then they have several minutes to complete a DLA form, which asks them to evaluate the aesthetics as well as the content. They look specifically for figurative language, allusions to historical events or cultural referents, and samples or unusual instrumentation.

The DLA process often starts slowly, but I give them a 1-10 scale for both aesthetics and lyrical content, which provides a low-stress way to participate. We discuss what features of the music are effective (or not), and then move into the details about what’s being said. This split allows us to appreciate music that sounds great, but contains irrelevant or troubling content. The poster child for this phenomenon is Dr. Dre’s classic “Nuthin’ But a G Thang”. Its smooth sound set the gold standard for the west-coast funk rebirth, but Dre uses the opportunity to say: “if you b-----s talk s--t, I’ll have to put the smack down”. This might seem like simple posing, except that Dre once violently attacked a journalist named Dee Barnes after she wrote something he didn’t like.

201 While I encourage students to pay attention to the lyrics they hear, I’m quick to point out that hip-hop is not unique. Most people enjoy music with lyrics that are meaningless or retrograde; Ted Nugent and Steely Dan are two quick examples. Furthermore, many hip-hop artists evolve during their careers and confront the shortcomings in their lyrical content. The

Beastie Boys are Exhibit A, moving from the objectifying party track “Girls” on their 1986 debut album Licensed to Ill to the deep reflective track “Bodhisattva Vow” just eight years later on Ill ​ ​ ​ Communication. Even Snoop Dogg (AKA Snoop Lion), whose 1993 debut album Doggystyle ​ ​ broke new ground on misogyny in rap music, told talk show host Tavis Smiley in 2013: “I haven’t been sayin’ nothing, pertaining to what really matters.”

The tracks we study in Daily Lyrical Analysis are sorted into three general categories:

(A) Songs the kids know well; (B) Classics that every student of hip-hop needs to know; and (C)

Amazing or important tracks that no one knows about. As when I discuss famous authors at the start of each Creative Writing class, I have to strike a balance and discuss each group in roughly equal measure. Fortunately, most of my students keep their minds open (or allow them to open over the semester, at least), and I love hearing from the kids about how they’ve added The Coup or Brother Ali to their playlists.

DLA allows for simple cross-pollination with the world of “real” poetry. Techniques like alliteration and parody are everywhere in hip-hop, but conceits and allegories are easy to find as well. We use DLA tracks as starting points for model poems and response lyrics. Blending the role of audience and creator has always been central to the energy of hip-hop, and the same is true in the classroom during Interdisciplinary Poetics.

202 Daily Lyrical Analysis allows for some fascinating discussions. The best hip-hop (from which I draw most of our DLA offerings) features clever wordplay and allusions to all walks of life. References to COINTELPRO, Dolomite, Steve Biko, and Bob Marley let the students learn about history, culture, and social dynamics. When DLA examines some very dense lyrics (such as “Coded Language” by Saul Williams), I make sure we have time to analyze it in depth. Along the way, I take care to draw connections to the literary canon. (Mr. Williams makes this easy, given all of the towering literary heroes he alludes to in that song.)

The other constant in the class is a weekly writing assignment: students must write 20 lines of original lyrics each week. This is surprising to some, who expect the course to be entirely historical. But the essence of hip-hop is in participation, and culminates each week in a

Friday Open Mic. I don’t require students to perform for their peers, but many of them are willing to give it a shot. The best moment of every semester is watching that timid kid with something to say move to the podium for the first time and spit fire. The class is very supportive

— I’m prepared to call them out on harassment or ridicule, but I’ve found this isn’t much of an issue; they tend to show love even without the threat of punishment.

The first lyric-writing assignments are totally open; some students enjoy the freedom to pick a topic, but most want more direction. Soon I give them topics like weekends, a difficult time they survived, and life “back in the day”. This last one is a perpetual favorite in hip-hop, with standout tracks from Paris, Ahmad, and Coolio.

I remind them that we’re in a school, and they must therefore consider their audience and context. I don’t require lyrics that are appropriate for all ages, but they have to keep it relatively clean. A few students drop in references to naughty things, but they’re usually willing to keep it

203 clean (especially when they lose a few points for repeated offenses). I don’t want them to sanitize their message, so long as it’s real and important. On the other hand, I encourage them to find the “third way” between Ned Flanders-like inoffensive expression and the coarse language of many popular songs, with radio edits bleeping (or silencing) every other word. Put another way: You can be rough and real without having to curse. It just takes more time and effort. On the other hand, I understand that writers always have to use the right word. When a young lady read her lyrics in class about being raped, I didn’t admonish her for calling the rapist “an a--hole”, because somehow “jerkface” didn’t quite do the job.

We also practice some intermediate poetry techniques like internal rhyme, meter, and figurative language. The students have spent plenty of time finding these techniques in situ ​ during Daily Lyrical Analysis, so they’re usually capable of incorporating them into their own lyrics. We look at the meter of popular lyrics, to get a scientific take on how flow works in music. I expected Paul Edwards’ 2009 book How to Rap to disappoint, but it features a superb ​ ​ discussion of meter, as well as advice and techniques from hundreds of different MCs. We write a few lines of iambic pentameter just for extra practice; most students struggle and mess it up, but a few are able to grasp the concept. As I tell them: If you can write iambic pentameter, you can master any kind of rhythm you want to use.

One technique to make weekly lyrics more varied is the pass-around technique I learned one summer at a workshop on Hip-Hop in Education. The best method involves arranging desks in a circle, but with a large class this isn’t always possible. There are two variants; one is simply to have each student write one line, then pass the paper to her/his right, and have that student write the next line. Continue until 20 lines are done.

204 The other method is more interesting: Have the students write a random word on the right ​ side of the page (perhaps “morning”). Papers are passed to the left, and the next student writes a word below the first that rhymes (“storming”). It’s a good idea to have a few rhyming dictionaries available for this activity, and they prove useful at other times too. Papers are passed again, but this time the students add a word that is conceptually related to the second word

(“rain” is conceptually related to “storming”, for example). Pass again, and Word #4 is one that rhymes (“pain”). Continue this process, with words on odd lines that are conceptually related, and words on even lines that rhyme. It’s a confusing process, but when it’s finished, the students have their end rhyme done for them. (Occasionally the pattern is messed up and the authors have to be extra creative.) All that’s left for homework is filling in the first parts of each line. These open mics are especially fun, since students in the audience can keep their ears peeled for the unusual words they stuck into the first part of the process. It’s a good idea to encourage students with large vocabularies to avoid dropping in esoteric terms, since the last thing we want is other students feeling frustrated because they have to rhyme something they don’t understand.

Another fun technique is to mirror a popular song’s structure and/or style with original lyrics. These can be parodies, like the song “White and Nerdy” from “Weird Al” Yankovic, after

Chamillionaire’s hit “Ridin’ Dirty”. (We spend one week writing deliberate parodies.) But some students take a more serious approach and produce lyrics that are every bit as heartfelt as the original. My favorite track to use here is Ice Cube’s “Today Was A Good Day”. In it, he uses the power of negative space to describe all the things that don’t happen — “today nobody I know got ​ ​ killed in South Central LA / I gotta say it was a good day”. The absence of these terrors, then, reflects the vast difference between his world and that of my students. (Although some of them

205 come from places which are sadly similar to Cube’s world.) Some students use the opportunity to describe their rough home lives, while others describe a fun-filled day at school without homework.

Some students want to freestyle, and I used to set aside time for this purpose. But I quickly decided to eliminate it from the class, for several reasons. First of all, they weren’t serious about it — I never saw students earnestly working to improve their freestyle skills with thematic development or linguistic polish. Instead, they just wanted to joke around and goof off.

The other problem with freestyling is that it leads to much more frequent profanity and vulgarity. ​ ​ When the pressure of extemporaneous performance is added into the mix, young people are ten times more likely to throw in a “b-tch” or an f-bomb. So we stick to written lyrics, and I tell the students to practice their freestyles in their own time.

During the course’s early years, I organized a larger community event to showcase the students’ lyrics. Unfortunately, we never had a significant audience. Whether because of bad timing, poor marketing, or simple lack of interest, we abandoned this effort and instead spent our time compiling a polished collection of lyrics for each class. This also serves as a keepsake for the class, something for the students to hang onto and read in years after graduation.

Mix the disciplines.

Several weeks at the start of the semester are devoted to the history of hip-hop. Our textbook is Nelson George’s Hip-Hop America, which I chose for its balance between historical ​ ​ perspective, industry insight, and cultural perspective. Alas, given many students’ dislike for

206 reading — coupled with deficits in their reading ability — I’m lucky if half of the students read a

15-page chapter for homework. We also read excerpts from Jeff Chang’s essential history Can’t ​ Stop Won’t Stop, as well as other sources. We watch the 1983 documentary film Style Wars, ​ ​ ​ which brings graffiti into the discussion, as well as footage of early b-boy/b-girl dancing. (The students are endlessly amused by the fashion trends of the early ‘80s.) We also watch an excerpt from the 2010 documentary Rubble Kings, about how gang leaders in New York used hip-hop as ​ ​ a way to evolve out of the gang wars that were destroying their communities. We also review a series of presentations I’ve prepared about important events, albums, and trends in hip-hop history from 1973, when DJ Kool Herc hosted his first block party and Afrika Bambaataa started the Zulu Nation, to 2005, when Young Jeezy’s debut album Let’s Get It was released. ​ ​ With a few exceptions, the students are startled by how much they don’t know about the history of hip-hop. Names like Run-DMC are familiar to some, but there is a general sense among young people that rap music began with Tupac Shakur. (That’s sometimes written verbatim on questionnaires at the start of the semester.) This strikes at the heart of the course, driven by my love for history and literature: If we can’t keep the history of hip-hop alive for young people, what chance do we have with American history in general, or the history of humans in the last 2500 years? Fortunately, the students are eager to learn. The number one comment I receive at the end of each semester is “I never realized how much history I was missing.” Best of all, this historical awareness enters their lives in tangible ways, through music entering their daily rotations.

I also make a clear distinction to the students between the rap industry (which is responsible for most of what they’ve heard) and hip-hop culture (which birthed the entire genre

207 and came directly from a community effort). While industries of all kinds have various effects — some positive, some negative — on the communities in which they function, the rap industry has a particular power to shape our thinking (and exploit the resources) of the entire urban community, especially in ghettos and barrios. Hip-hop culture, on the other hand, grows organically from those same ghettos and barrios (and trailer parks and suburbs, in more recent years, not to mention reservations and refugee camps), giving voice to people living inside (and resisting with creativity) the contradictions of post-industrial capitalism. These issues are discussed explicitly toward the end of the class, but they’re woven into the fabric of hip-hop itself, so we can’t avoid them at the outset.

After the history section of the course is done, we spend a couple of weeks studying the influence of jazz and blues on hip-hop. We’re lucky to have a nationally-recognized jazz music program at our school, and its coordinator is a remarkable teacher with oodles of charisma and soul. He joins us for a day of jazz history, sharing video and audio from Count Basie, Duke

Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Tito Puente. We discuss overlapping elements like improvisation and solo vs. group dynamics.

By the time mid-semester approaches, we watch the movie Slam as a starting point for ​ ​ our exploration of the larger social issues at work in the music. (It’s also a great introduction to spoken-word poetry, like the kind Sarah Kay discusses in her TED Talk “If I Should Have a

Daughter”.) We analyze the scourge of drugs in black and latino communities, as well as the disproportionate response of law enforcement as described by Michelle Alexander in her 2010 book The New Jim Crow and Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary film 13th. We discuss prison ​ ​ ​ ​ life (which Slam depicts with brutal honesty) and the economics of unemployment. We discuss ​ ​

208 politics and the resistance potential of hip-hop culture. These themes are ubiquitous in the lyrics we analyze from day one, but by halftime we’re ready to dissect them more fully. We read opinion pieces from newspapers and engage in dialectic conversations about how to break cycles of violence and despair. We confront the legacy of white supremacy in the United States and wrestle with the realities of capitalism for the most vulnerable parts of our society.

Then it’s on to gender analysis. Whereas most students are in agreement on racial issues

(or else unwilling to be a lone voice against the general consensus of hip-hop politics), we see a very different conversation with regard to sexuality and gender roles. If a tension develops between students of different racial backgrounds (as it sometimes does), the dynamics shift dramatically when we start discussing gender. Suddenly black guys and white guys are teaming up to defend the ubiquity of scantily-clad women in rap videos. (I’m always surprised when the ladies in the class join them, but it happens.) They love to repeat the mantra of “no one’s forcing them to do anything”, and I have to explain the difference between social coercion and force, not to mention the process — which I thought most kids would understand by the age of 15 — of directors and producers giving orders to people on a set. I love to mock the notion that directors just ask women: “So what would you like to do while he’s rapping?” With the farcical answer: ​ ​ “How about I wear a bikini while pouring champagne on myself?”

As a lifelong feminist, I take these issues seriously. I make it clear to the students that respect for women is not kryptonite to someone who loves hip-hop. By incorporating female ​ ​ MCs from the jump, and bringing them voices of feminist hip-hop critics (who love the music), I make it clear that I will tolerate neither objectification of women nor absurd oversimplification on issues of gender. Just as we can (and should) critique the cultural limitations and prejudices in

209 Shakespeare and Conrad, so too must we bring a critical eye to our love of modern literary expressions.

An invaluable resource here is Byron Hurt’s 2006 documentary film Hip-Hop: Beyond ​ Beats and Rhymes. Hurt played football at Northeastern University before working with a ​ violence-prevention mentoring program at the school. This led him to question some of the messages he was hearing in the music he loves, and his movie was the result of a deep exploration through the culture and industry. It does a superb job of linking corporate consolidation with retrograde content, and features interviews with virtuoso MCs like Mos Def and Chuck D, as well as industry bigwigs like Russell Simmons and BET’s Stephen Hill. It also discusses these issues with aspiring rappers (who explain the boundaries of content imposed by major labels) and even examines taboo subjects in hip-hop like homosexuality and transgender identity. Because the film is so dense, we watch one or two segments each day, with plenty of time for discussion after each.

Our final exam is a comprehensive review of the historical, cultural, and literary components of the course. It’s an essay test, with a creative component at the end requiring the student to prove her/his mastery of poetic and structural concepts. They scribble furiously for the entire 90 minutes, but I’ve saved more than one student paper because of the high quality work that gets turned in.

Know your students.

210 Every group of students in every class I’ve ever taught has been a mixed bag, and the same course can have a wildly different studentry during two different hours of the day.

Interdisciplinary Poetics tends to be even more unpredictable; one group of students will hate everything I put before them, while the next will respond with enthusiasm to every track. (I had one exuberant class that even loved “Rappin’ Duke”, if you can believe it.)

I am cautious of the mindset, common among many teachers, that we should prepare ourselves for the students before they come through the door. Before I began teaching at a new school one time, a colleague took me aside with a sheaf of papers. Showing me the rosters for the classes I would be teaching, she went through each name and described each kid as “good” or

“bad” or “interesting”. This is unhealthy behavior, since it locks us into mindsets of prediction and assumption.

Still, it can be healthy to review general trends among those who take your classes, and prepare for likely waves of behavior. Interdisciplinary Poetics draws an intriguing variety of students, which tend to fall into four sub-groups, although plenty of cross-pollination takes place.

1. The first group is The Know-It-Alls. They’ve been listening to hip-hop all their lives, ​ ​ and they’re quite certain there’s nothing for them to learn from some pudgy bald

middle-aged white guy English teacher. This is the group I would have been in as a

student; they make up about 35% of an average class. Some of them have parents who

listen to hip-hop (another testament to my age), who come to parent-teacher conferences

excited to discuss their own love for Das Efx or MC Lyte. These students are the most

surprised at the limits of their knowledge, but they’re also (assuming they can conquer

the shock to their ego) eager to absorb what they don’t know. They tend to dive into the

211 analysis and pour themselves into the weekly lyric-writing (and performance), even if

they don’t do most of the reading assignments. They often write lyrics of great

sophistication, both aesthetically and thematically. Some of them only love and respect

the trends of the day, and reject the “old-timey” junk from the 1990s I promote in class.

Because most of The Know-It-Alls are African-American, they’re often pleasantly

surprised to find a frank discussion of race in America, and they have a base of

knowledge that allows them to contribute in ways they don’t experience in other English

classes. They’re the ones who get my references to movies like Friday and Do The Right ​ ​ ​ Thing. ​

2. The second group is The Slacker Types. They appear in every class in every school, but ​ ​ they take on a unique persona in Interdisciplinary Poetics. They listen to hip-hop every

day, and assume they can get an easy grade by taking a class on it. (When discussing his

first Black History course in college, Chris Rock once joked: “I gotta know this, right?

I’m black! I get a B just for showing up, right?”) As their name implies, The Slacker

Types are not ignorant, but they tend to be lazy and/or unmotivated. They’ve become

convinced (for a variety of reasons) that everything in school is boring and pointless, and

our class is no exception. They don’t read the books, they don’t participate in Daily

Lyrical Analysis, and they rarely share their lyrics (if they bother to write them at all). As

noted earlier, such attitudes are usually rooted in deep pathologies of family dysfunction,

intellectual neglect, and/or social despair. (Although plenty of them come from

well-to-do homes with both parents offering genuine love and support.) Slacker Types

come from all racial backgrounds, and unfortunately they make up around 40% of a

212 typical class. Fortunately, I’ve seen more than a couple of Slacker Types reorient

themselves during the class, and start absorbing the material in powerful ways. This is

rare in every classroom, but it’s always a delight to behold.

3. The third group is the smallest, which I call The Distant Anthropologists. These are ​ ​ kids with zero hip-hop experience; they often listen to heavy metal or punk rock. They

are, however, intrigued by music of all kinds, and especially how music reflects society.

They latch onto the parallels between hip-hop and other genres of music, and they’re

pleasantly surprised by how much they have in common with the hip-hop community.

They’re mostly white and Asian, and they’re often uncomfortable at first by their outsider

status, which is unusual for them in school. They do not share their lyrics, but they write ​ ​ them faithfully every week. (And they’re usually creative.) They’re quiet during class

discussions, but they soak up perspectives and opinions from the other students. The

Distant Anthropologists are the ones most likely to seize one of my random asides (to

Gary Webb’s book Dark Alliance, for example) and look into it. They make up about ​ ​ 15% of an average IP class.

4. The remaining 10% is made up of The Oblivious Brainiacs. These are students who do ​ ​ well in school and listen to some popular rap music, but know nothing about its history

and are totally unfamiliar with the concept of hip-hop culture. They tend to be white and

politically conservative, but also curious and eager to learn. They write lyrics that are

earnest and stylistically effective, but usually lack any sort of funk or swing. They read

the material, but find themselves even more disconnected from it than The Distant

213 Anthropologists are. They often bristle at the political overtones of the course content,

but they’re usually unwilling to say so publicly.

The interactions of these different groups is essential to the unique character of the course.

Everyone learns from everyone, and it’s just as important for a Distant Anthropologist to describe her experience at a punk show in the next town as it is for a Know-It-All to explain his family’s history with hip-hop music in Chicago. More to the point, it’s rare for these different types of students to come together for open discourse, and it’s tremendously rewarding to see them converse as equals, affirming their individual experiences and cheering each other on during an open mic.

Similar demographic breakdowns occur in my Creative Writing and literature classes.

While it’s foolish to pigeonhole new students into these categories, it’s also human nature to create schema in our heads, to make sense of the hundreds of kids we deal with every year. They key, as always, is to find a balance — here, avoiding naive individualism on the one hand, and airtight and insufficient labels on the other.

Be ready to adapt.

Recently a teacher I’ll nickname “K” joined the English faculty at our school. We quickly found a number of shared interests, including a love of hip-hop. He mentioned his desire to teach

Interdisciplinary Poetics. While I love the idea of helping other teachers lead courses that most interest them, I wasn’t ready to give up my special baby. I had spent years refining and

214 improving the course, and loved having it as part of my day. I had every confidence that he would do a good job with it, but I worried that he might not do quite as good a job as I could.

Eventually I realized this was an ego trip, and I admitted that one of my biggest worries was that he might teach it more effectively than I do. To everyone’s surprise (including my own), ​ ​ I let go of the reins and let him have a turn. At the same time, I was given the responsibility of teaching Creative Writing 2 and AP English, and therefore had a more complicated schedule. K’s takeover of Interdisciplinary Poetics was fortuitous for everyone involved, although I took it back a few years later. (He went on to design a unique class of his own, on graphic novels, something about which he is especially passionate.) He did an excellent job with

Interdisciplinary Poetics, introducing elements I had neglected (especially helping students with production of recorded tracks), and I was proud to work with him to make the course better.

We teachers must occasionally respond to objections like those raised by the dissenting school board member when I first introduced the class. Sometimes they will discover a printout with mature lyrics and express their disapproval to an administrator. We have to respond with respect for their concerns, while protecting our intellectual integrity and academic freedom as stewards of young minds.

More the point, however, I think these controversies speak to the heart of a dilemma raging in every school (especially every high school) in the United States: Many of our students live in worlds of violence, despair, neglect, suffering, poverty, discrimination, prejudice, and uncertainty. Obviously, reading literature is a bulwark against these ills, and a way for us to confront them; the novels of Sherman Alexie, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, and Amy Tan provide essential ways for us to speak honestly to our students about the human condition. But I’ve found

215 that hip-hop is another key for such discussions, and I’ve heard specifically from more than one student that they have learned more in one semester of Interdisciplinary Poetics than in any other single English class they’d ever taken. There are many reasons for this, of course, and I would never suggest that a hip-hop curriculum should replace classical literature. By using a tool that many young people love, we can crack open their skulls and infuse their minds with insight, enlightenment, and erudition with success that no other tool can achieve. The same is true of graphic novels, as well as jazz, video production, culinary arts, and many other specialized courses our school offers.

Interdisciplinary Poetics is my greatest curricular achievement, and I believe my work with it can be useful for teachers across the educational landscape. Even if an entire course on hip-hop is a luxury that most schools can’t afford (and I recognize my involvement with it as a great honor and privilege), many classes can benefit from including elements of hip-hop analysis. By bringing hip-hop’s fidelity to authenticity and multicultural celebration into the classroom, we can build bridges to past eras and classic literature (to say nothing of scientific inquiry and even mathematical problem-solving) in new and exciting ways. The key, as always, is a genuine love for the art and honest interactions with students.

216 10. Solidarity matters.

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together..”

Lilla Watson and the Aboriginal Activists’ Group Queensland, Australia (1970s) ​ ​

We teachers in the US are in an odd place in the class structure. We are ostensibly professionals, but we aren’t treated like doctors or lawyers. We’re rank-and-file workers, but we’re often seen (and we often see ourselves) as much more white-collar than the custodians and secretaries on staff. Some of us live very comfortable lives, while others must work second or third jobs to make ends meet.

Nevertheless, we are working people. In our schools and districts, the administration is the management, and we are the workers. Therefore we have the right— and the responsibility

— to stand together in order to demand the things we need. This comes with union membership, yes, but it takes other forms as well.

In our post-industrial society, when so many people bemoan the excesses of union executives, some teachers (like many other Americans) believe we don’t even need unions. They wonder why they should bother paying union dues, when their budgets are so tight and the benefits feel ephemeral.

There are two reasons why every teacher should belong to a union. The first is material, and the other is systemic.

Like all workers, teachers only get what they deserve when they stand together to demand just treatment. Our ancestors in the NEA and AFT fought long, hard struggles for us to

217 enjoy a decent standard of living. Unions push for better supplies, smaller classes, and decent benefits. The contracts that we negotiate (or did, in states like Wisconsin which have recently outlawed union contracts) are the result of mutual exertion and power dynamics. Without unions, administrations will keep giving us bigger classes and older materials. This isn’t a matter of personalities; it’s the nature of the institutions.

The second reason we need unions is to secure democracy at work. We Americans are puzzling in our demand for democracy in all things except the workplace. But why should we submit to a tyranny of individuals or committees in the place where we spend so much of our lives? Unions give us a voice at work, and make sure that we are included in the most important decisions governing our work lives.

Tenure is a good example. Without unions, school districts are free to fire teachers without due process. Plenty of hysteria has been spread in recent years about union excesses protecting terrible teachers, and this misinformation has led many Americans to believe that unions hurt our students. In fact, school districts still have plenty of ways to prosecute illegal or improper behavior, and educators need institutional protection if they are going to take risks for intellectually honest discussions in the classroom.

Furthermore, the hyperbole about “bad teachers” is predicated on two assumptions, both of them false: (1) it’s easy to tell who the bad teachers are, and (2) there’s no way to change a teacher’s skill level. I hope Chapter 5 explained why the first assumption is ludicrous, so I shan’t elaborate on that absurdity. As for the second, every teacher in the world can explain how they have improved over time. We learn a billion things every semester. We beat ourselves up endlessly for our mistakes, and we watch the good stuff so we can build on it. Those of us who

218 lose our passions or succumb to lazy methods can be — and often are — reoriented with the support of our coworkers and supervisors. If you don’t believe people can improve, then why are you involved with education at all? Do you really believe teachers are so very different from students?

The corollary to this second assumption is that experience doesn’t matter. Some districts around the country have done away with pay schedules based on experience, implementing instead rewards for “professional development”, for which teachers must pay out of their own pocket (and complete in their “free” time). Those who don’t have time or money for this extra work must bid farewell to ever getting a raise again. This despite the fact that we become more effective teachers each time we find a way to connect with a struggling student, or revise the curriculum for the classes we teach.

Meanwhile, the anti-union sentiment in the US today has led to an unsettling uncertainty among educators as a whole. When Scott Walker’s Act 10 passed in Wisconsin, we saw a rush of teachers leaving the profession. More stress, less pay, and different systems of control were just some of the causes. The rest of us are constantly exhorted to find ways of “doing more with less”, often by administrators who disagree profoundly with the assault on our organizational voice. (Again, it’s not a question of individual personalities.)

Many educators, like many workers across the board, also believe that unions are unnecessary today because of the growth of “teams” in workplace structures. In our schools, we’re all invited to join committees in charge of building culture, scheduling, and curriculum development. But these sub-structures are entirely contingent on the good will of the folks with power over them. Sometimes they are toothless, while other times they have influence.

219 Sometimes their recommendations will be carried our, and other times they will be ignored. The point, of course, is that our voices as working people should not be open for discussion or dismissal. We should not wait and hope for a benevolent person in a position of power to take heed to our opinions and requirements. Instead, we must stand up and demand the respect we deserve.

Connect with other struggles.

As important as the conflicts in your school and district may be, you should remember that teachers like you are experiencing similar battles around the country.

We saw a dramatic example of this in the teacher strikes across West Virginia in

February and March 2018. With pay rates ranked 48th in the nation, teachers across the state decided they needed to take dramatic action to force a change. These strikes were illegal; the state’s Attorney General was prepared to enforce the ban if necessary. Governor Jim Justice offered a small raise to prevent the walkouts, but the teachers refused, pointing out that the tiny amount on the table would not even keep pace with inflation.

Of course salaries were not the only issue. Rising health care costs were also a factor, along with a lack of power in the workplace. Despite the lack of resolution for the health-care issue (the legislation that ended the strike in early March did not address that aspect of the problem), we can be sure that the remarkable solidarity shown by these courageous educators will not be forgotten in future deliberations.

220 The West Virginia strike inspired similar actions in Oklahoma and Arizona. These did not result in nearly the same kind of success, but it is nevertheless refreshing to see teachers exercise their power to collective action in the name of better schools.

The point, of course, is that these sorts of labor actions happen all the time in states across the nation. When I graduated from the University of Florida School of Education, I slipped the UF President a note urging him to stop plans to move custodial workers to the “night shaft”, a graveyard assignment that would hurt workers. It was an early moment of cross-employment solidarity for me, but it would not be the last.

Working people in the US often think of themselves as solidly middle-class, an amorphous designation that brings few tangible benefits, while eliminating the need to consider the benefits of solidarity with people working in other fields. But the best spirit of human uplift is based on people working together, even if that work doesn’t feed our own narrow personal self-interest. Just as we all help and sacrifice for friends and family, we should all be prepared to defend and strengthen our communities. This is a lot to ask of teachers whose minds and spirits are exhausted at the end of a long day in the classroom. But when our communities have more resources and power, then we all benefit in indirect ways.

Teachers should also be conscious of the need for intersectionality. Just as we cannot turn a blind eye to the needs of other working people, neither can we ignore the injustices taking place every day against people of color, women, LGBTQ+ folks, disabled people, and humans of other vulnerabilities. We educators are uniquely qualified to bring insight and compassion into the struggles for a better world, and we have a responsibility to exercise our intellectual authority to fight oppression and injustice.

221 Again, this can be tough for those of us with jumper cables clamped to our brains.

Fighting police brutality and white supremacy can call forth energy reserves that we don’t always have. But there are often small ways to join the movements for a better world, no matter where your interests lie. The myth of the purist martyr with no social life is a dangerous fable that can dissuade people from getting involved in political struggles. Even if you can only donate a few bucks, there are small ways to help out.

We owe this much to our students. When hate crimes go up, young people come to school with more stress and anger inside. When families are split up because of ignorant immigration policy, young people show up in our classrooms with more trauma and uncertainty.

When police brutalize poor black communities, young people seethe with justified resentment and hostility. (And they’re less likely to work with authority figures at school.)

So we see that all solidarity movements are in fact forms of enlightened long-term self-interest. We must work together because our freedoms are all bound together. When some of us are oppressed, then none of us are free. I don’t want to stop homelessness because I have some altruistic ball of golden light in my soul. I don’t like being hassled for spare change on the ​ ​ street. I don’t like seeing people sleeping outside in the wealthiest nation in the history of the ​ ​ world. I cannot ask my students to read literature or write stories, putting themselves into the shoes of other people, if I’m not willing to do the same — and then take action when I do.

Follow the money.

222 I could (and probably will) write an entire book about the various political issues facing humanity in the 21st century, but I want to touch briefly on economic matters here, because they hold a special place of importance for teachers. The ups and downs of Wall Street have a unique resonance for our schools. Every deep cut to a state budget will inevitably trickle down to us.

When crashes happen, education is often hit the hardest.

In Wisconsin, for example, the 2008 crash on Wall Street resulted in Governor Scott

Walker’s ridiculous “Budget Repair Bill”, which — among other things — eviscerated unions for public sector workers like teachers and nurses. Walker went on to cut state education budgets to the bone, causing even more damage. If we are to resist such retrograde policy proposals, we need to understand the true nature of such “crises”, as well as the context in which each is born.

The US economy has experienced a revolution in financialization and expansion of corporate power over the last 40 years that has benefitted Wall Street while devastating local communities. The scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and other corporations at the start of the new century demonstrated a blinding devotion among business leaders to short-term profit gain at the expense of their own institutions — not to mention ordinary Americans. This devotion has been encouraged and abetted by investors on Wall Street, who have taken unconscionable risks and committed serious fraud, as documented by Charles Ferguson in his

Academy-Award-winning documentary film Inside Job (and the 2012 follow-up book Predator ​ ​ ​ Nation). These risks became much more dangerous in the 1990s after the Clinton administration ​ repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which had prevented investors from using deposits of regular people for their get-rich-quick schemes. Arcane investment instruments like Collateralized Debt

Obligations (CDOs) and Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) have complicated the problem, as has the

223 wave of deregulation championed by presidents since 1980 and the reliance by large banks on ridiculous amounts of leverage.

These problems culminated in the financial crisis of 2008, which was supposedly impossible to foresee and for which no banking executive has been held accountable. In fact, large banks received bailout money from the federal government while homeowners faced unemployment, debt, and foreclosure; bank executives received record bonuses a well. The

Dodd-Frank Act instituted a shockingly mild adjustment to the financial services industry, while leaving most of the problems which had caused the crash unaddressed. Recently the Trump

Administration has advocated repealing even those minor restrictions.

Another intriguing phenomenon that has crawled out of Wall Street in recent years is the practice of High-Frequency Trading (HFT), in which computers buy stocks and bonds and sell them immediately, holding them for a fraction of a second in order to earn a fraction of a cent.

They do this over and over, all day every day, using information that comes from an unfathomable variety of sources. We don’t know exactly what sources these trading algorithms use for their trades, because each piece of software is the property of its investment firm, and guarded with great secrecy. As a result, no one is quite sure what caused the 2010 “Flash Crash”, but we know that HFT was almost certainly responsible when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged almost 1,000 points in a half-hour. Michael Lewis garnered a great deal of media attention for his 2014 book about HFT, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, but I prefer Scott ​ ​ Patterson’s 2013 history Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the US ​ Stock Market. ​

224 During all of these changes and catastrophes, federal regulators like Alan Greenspan and

Timothy Geithner have insisted that corporate megapowers need no real supervision and markets would regulate themselves. Large financial institutions, meanwhile, have spent billions of dollars lobbying federal legislators to encourage the passage of lax restrictions on their industry. They add to this influence through the process of “regulatory capture”, in which they encourage the executive branch to place former bankers in positions of power, and/or offer regulators lucrative positions on the boards of directors once they leave government.

Meanwhile, tax rates have been skewed heavily to burden middle- and lower-income citizens while wealthy Americans avoid taxes through loopholes, offshore havens, and well-paid accountants. A wave of political tumult has raised anti-tax hysteria to a fever pitch in the form of the Tea Party, turning ordinary people against the very idea of taxes — a trend that has benefited rich folks while allowing our infrastructure to crumble.

These policies, not forces of nature or vulnerable communities of poor people, are the reason why our state and local economies are in trouble. We have allowed ourselves to be blinded from our own best interests, mostly because those who want to tilt things in their favor have lots of money and power. Finding the truth takes time and effort, and most people

(especially people who are exhausted from working two jobs to feed their families) aren’t able to wade through the sea of rhetoric and propaganda to which they are subjected on a daily basis. As a result they are hoodwinked into blaming scapegoats and demanding that billionaires receive more wealth and power.

Things get even more complicated when we look at the international economic situation.

The Seattle protests in 1999 served as a global wake-up call to the shady dealings of the World

225 Trade Organization, which organizes global economic structures in ways that mostly benefit wealthy countries and (perhaps even moreso) trans-national corporations that claim no loyalty to particular nation-states. Aided by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the WTO pressures workers in third-world countries to toil for very low pay, avoid protecting their environment, abolish independent unions, grow cash crops, allow the dumping of goods from overseas, and welcome the presence of monoculture corporate behemoths. Laws that might prevent these things are branded as “barriers to free trade” and prohibited by trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Multilateral Agreement on Investing, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

These agreements are unhealthy for working people in other countries, but they hurt

American workers too. Because manufacturers can produce their goods for much cheaper overseas, corporations send their jobs out of the US. The employers who do stay here can demand more concessions, longer hours, fewer safety rules, more relaxed environmental protections, and an end to collective bargaining.

Automation and computer technology are factors in this discussion, but we must recognize that they are used in very specific ways. Workers could be empowered by technological innovation, but this rarely happens in American corporations. Instead, workers are made unnecessary and the wealth generated by the machines is hoarded by those who own them.

(The logical extreme of this scenario was examined by Kurt Vonnegut in his eerily prescient first novel Player Piano.) And what will we do with the wealth generated by these machines? ​ ​ Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking put it beautifully in a 2015 online Q&A session:

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth

226 is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

All of these things affect us as teachers, but they affect our students too. As the Cambridge professor Ha-Joon Chang says, we all have a responsibility to become knowledgeable economic citizens, so that we can advocate for more intelligent choices in the vital areas of economic policy. You owe it to yourself as a working person — and your students, as future working humans — to understand the way money works in our lives.

Know your world.

Finally, remember that you are part of a global family of educators. True solidarity is a worldwide affair, overcoming mere boundaries and borders. One reason Amnesty International has been so successful since its founding in 1961 is a relentless global focus on human rights abuses in all places. By standing up for our brothers and sisters around the world, we stand up for ourselves and move the planet closer to a place where justice matters.

In 2014, a group of 43 student teachers from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College in

Mexico were abducted by police who then handed them to the Guerreros Unidos criminal organization. Questions about who was responsible and how closely the government worked with Guerreros Unidos remain unclear. As teachers, we should take seriously this attack on our profession. The Teachers’ College is known for radical activism, and I would condemn the student teachers’ habit of “commandeering buses” for protest purposes. Still, the lives lost are unacceptable, and we must stand up for our colleagues who are murdered like this in cold blood.

227 (We could learn from the Committee to Protect Journalists, which demands accountability any time reporters or photographers are killed in the line of duty.)

More generally, however, we should understand how education works in other places.

We should learn from Finland, yes — much attention has been shown to that nation in recent years because of their good outcomes and unorthodox methods — but we can (and should) also learn from educators in Indonesia, Greece, The Gambia, and Uruguay. We Americans are woefully oblivious to people in other places, and it holds us back. (Just 36% of us have valid passports, for example.)

Let’s consider, as a case study, the nation-to-nation rankings published every three years by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s PISA [Programme for

International Student Assessment] study. This series of tests, carried out since 2000, ranks each nation’s students in mathematics, science, and reading. Asian nations like Singapore, Japan, and

South Korea regularly place in the Top 10.

In 2009, commentators and education “reformers” became hysterical about the appearance of China in the #1 spot. And endless river of think pieces appeared, cheering for

China’s stripped-down focus on fundamentals and rigor. Some commentators, as expected, bemoaned the ubiquity in American education of humanities, cooperation, and “soft” methods.

This pattern was repeated in 2012 when China again came in first.

Results like these can be demoralizing for educators in the US. (I can only imagine how teachers in Peru feel, when their students so often trail the pack.) But a more comprehensive understanding of this data is essential for all of us, to avoid simplistic thinking and escape the trap of easy-answer policy proposals.

228 Only certain parts of China were included in the 2009 and 2012 PISA rankings. ​ ​ Shanghai, specifically, took the 2012 top spot, trailed closely by Hong Kong. According to The ​ Guardian, Shanghai is home to only 2% of China’s people, and it contains a remarkable share of ​ the country’s wealth. When China first participated in PISA in 2009, students from a dozen provinces took the test, but only Shanghai’s results were announced.

Meanwhile, actual teachers in China were quick to explain further. The Deputy Principal of Tsinghua University High School in Beijing, Jiang Xueqin, wrote a piece for CNN in which he explained the downsides of successful schools in Shanghai. Real estate costs are astronomical, providing one obvious barrier to entry. Bribes to administrators are common, to the point where the author explained its impact on his own life: “This culture of bribing public school officials means I can't maintain friendships, make new ones, and date — a girl I dated in 2010 told me she'd give me 200,000 yuan ($32,800) to get her sister into my school.”

The intense focus on test scores in Shanghai and other wealthy parts of China also affects the students deeply. “Incentives do not just make students stressed, lonely, and unhappy,”

Xueqin notes. “They also kill student's innate curiosity, creativity, and love of learning.” In fact,

Chinese education officials began working in the early 2010s to de-emphasize test scores, in response to these negative side effects.

This perspective is echoed by Michigan State University Professor Yong Zhao, who leads the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence. In a 2010 blog post, he writes:

It is no news that the Chinese education system is excellent in preparing outstanding test takers, just like other education systems within the Confucian cultural circle — Singapore, Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong. […] When you spend all your time preparing

229 for tests, and when students are selected based on their test-taking abilities, you get outstanding test scores.

He quotes a letter from a mother in China, whose daughter attends 12 hours of school every day, followed by Saturday classes and courses during winter and summer vacation.

This kind of practice has seriously damaged students’ health. They have completely lost motivation and interest in studying. My child’s health gets worse day by day. So is her mental spirit.

I doubt this is the kind of outcome anyone wants for their children, but it’s easy to accept it as an inevitable cost of excellent education.

Meanwhile, test-focused policies in the US like “No Child Left Behind” haven’t even produced the kinds of results they’re intended to create. As Washington Post education reporter

Valerie Strauss pointed out in 2010, US scores didn’t budge in the years before and after NCLB was implemented. Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, referred to the 2009 PISA scores (where US students placed, once again, solidly in the middle) as “a massive wake-up call”. Duncan had overseen the implementation of the four-billion NCLB-style “Race To The

Top” (RTTP) in 2009, which has created outcomes every bit as meaningful as those of NCLB.

Along with test preparation, then, we find that economic background is a top indicator of test results. In other words, these tests often don’t measure school efficacy or intelligence levels, so much as family wealth and access to resources. A 2013 report from Martin Carnoy and

Richard Rothstein explained how poor students in every country taking the PISA exams performed the worst, and students from low-poverty areas in the US did as well as those from the highest-performing nations. The report notes:

230 Because social class inequality is greater in the United States than in any of the countries with which we can reasonably be compared, the relative performance of U.S. adolescents is better than it appears when countries’ national average performance is conventionally compared.

Unfortunately, nuances like these are rarely seen in our national discourse about test rankings and how US students perform compared to kids in other countries. Of course we can educate our ​ ​ students better, and we should never grow jaded in our efforts to make schools more effective.

But we must do so in a conscious and enlightened way, resisting the temptation to chase easy answers or silver bullets. The more attuned we are to global events and educational conversations, the more capable we will be to provide a voice for sensible education policy here at home.

231