Author: Greg

The death of Ray Bradbury has received a lot of coverage in the British media, including a fine eulogy by the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, who reports a writer friend of hers saying, “When I was 12 or 13, I read every single book [of his]—I sought them out. I read them cover to cover.” Atwood’s answer: “I thought that a lot of writers—and a lot of readers—had most likely had the same experience. And that they would be writers and readers of the most diverse kinds – poets and prose writers, all ages, all levels of brow, from low to high.”

Indeed. A friend, when I was 14 and he 13, reported the same interest, and it was at his urging that I myself first read Bradbury—Dandelion Wine—at that age. My friend’s garden of forking paths led him to meet Bradbury three times subsequently. He now owns about six thousand books, something that Bradbury would surely have appreciated had he known. What the Internet-hating Bradbury might not have appreciated is that the friend has his library catalogued on the LibraryThing web site.

My own garden of forking paths included a meeting with Bradbury when I was a junior in high school. Impressed by what I had read and heard, I had written him, asking him to give a talk to the high-school club of which I was president. To my delight, he wrote back proposing that the club come up to Hollywood, where he was lecturing, attend the lecture, and then meet him afterwards. At our meeting he blazed another path in front of me when we discussed Moby Dick, which we had just read, and for the movie of which he had written the screenplay. We wondered how he could stand the book, but he gently turned aside our criticism, saying he saw what we meant because he had had to read it many times before being able to write the screenplay, but that in spite of its difficulty it was a wonderful book and that we should consider coming back to it some time.

That path connected with my final year in university, when I decided thanks to Bradbury’s urging that I would take a graduate course in the novels of Herman Melville. (It was a hair-raising term: one course was Melville with seven novels, a novella, and a collection of short stories; and another, offered by the challenging but greatly admired Professor Pious, had a 3,500-page reading list. Further reading came in a course on “equality and the social order,” where I read parts of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice). Who could have imagined what happened? The professor teaching the Melville course uttered the unbelievable direction “Read Moby Dick over the weekend.” It is true that the weekend comprised the five days between the Thursday and Tuesday lessons, but still: was he crazy? It turned out that I couldn’t put the book down, finishing it the day before class. It remains one of my favorite books, and I have read it through seven times, though that makes me a beginner compared to a friend who has read it more than two dozen times. If I hadn’t taken Bradbury’s recommendation to heart, I would have missed experiencing Moby Dick as I should have.

Another forking path ended this semester. I taught Bradbury for the first time: Fahrenheit 451 to a class of 10^th-graders. What struck me in the teaching was how insistent my students were that the novel was “about” censorship. Of course it is, in a way, but it is more “about” the impoverishment of life led in conditions where electronic “media” stop mediating life and actually become it. It is about life without books and without libraries. It is a life that Guy Montag, the hero, finally starts to recover from after he escapes the Mechanical Hound and experiences a night flight through a landscape that he can smell and hear—one free of the intrusive ads for Denham’s Dentifrice that had made his underground journey on the Vacuum Train so appalling.

“Underground journey” brings to mind a whole skein of forking paths in the main stacks of my college library. A bit like a Borgesian protagonist I would sometimes set off on a different sort of underground journey through the long narrow corridors, all silent, looking at the titles as they passed, or to the edge of the East Asian Library, further progress barred by book spines in Chinese characters and Hangul. I settled on the topic of a history paper for Professor Stern on a stroll through the stacks. (It was about the Kulturkampf and was not particularly good, but that was not the stacks’ fault.)

A last forking path leads from Bradbury, who couldn’t conceive of a world without libraries, to an article about a raft of new schools in Louisiana that have no libraries. The students in these schools spend their days in cubicles doing workbooks or in big rooms looking at “educational” DVDs. How big are the screens they view?

An old joke has it that when you mate a crocodile with an abalone you get a crock o’ baloney, but surely there must be other ways of producing it: how does such an abundance of baloney come to appear in the field of education? Why are so many educationists also balonists[1]?

One respected philosopher says that a balonist (not his word) is primarily concerned not with telling the truth but with promoting or protecting himself, or with keeping the boat he is on from being rocked. Such a person’s relationship with the truth is therefore accidental and opportunist; it yields truth claims that are phony. One current truth-tussle can illustrate.

Four professors, from Stanford, Cal Berkeley, and the University of Arizona, have been studying “value-added models” (VAMs) of evaluating teachers[2]. Here are just some of the results:

1. At least seven factors other than the individual teacher figure in students’ success. These include home and community supports and challenges, peer culture and achievement, and of course the specific tests used to “measure” “achievement.”
2. VAMs are inconsistent. Only 20% of teachers rated at the top or bottom of their district rankings retained those ratings in the following year, and when rated by different tests, 40 – 55% of teachers got “noticeably different scores.”
3. Teachers’ value-added “performance” is affected by the students assigned to them. One set of figures documents the experience of an English teacher whose rating changed from the first (worst) to the tenth (best) decile from one year to the next. The change was attributable not to his sudden emergence from a vegetative state, but to the fact that his students in the second year numbered fewer English learners, Hispanic students, and low-income students and more students with well-educated parents.
4. VAMs can’t disentangle these other factors influencing students’ (and “therefore” their teachers’) performance. Take for example an elementary school teacher who had been voted Teacher of the Month and Teacher of the Year in Houston, where her supervisor had rated her as “exceeding expectations.” She was fired as a result of her VAM scores, which showed wide fluctuations across and within subjects. These scores did not correct for her lower value-added in 4^th grade, when English learners are mainstreamed in her school district. Take also the VAM scores of teachers that “flip-flopped when they exchanged assignments.” When such stories start to circulate, guess how many teachers will accept assignments to classes with disadvantaged students!

Other ways of evaluating teachers, discussed at length in this article and in passing in these postings, are available and have been shown to work. Why, then, do we see such reliance on VAMs?

One answer is in the nature of a balonist. If his primary purpose is to serve not truth but himself, he does not particularly care what the truth is. Another, in this case, is in the nature of this particular baloney. Though rank and gross in nature, it seems to simplify and explain so much, and to deflect blame so effectively from the balonists using it, that it is irresistible to them. Finally, it jibes with a public tendency to be satisfied with crude methods of identifying and punishing members of undesirable classes. A complex problem can be simplified. Villains can be “found” and eliminated. The phoniness of the baloney doesn’t matter. The balonists—say, a cabinet secretary or the superintendent of an urban school district—can be seen as “tackling problems” and “making tough decisions.” What could be more desirable, except the truth?

In 1990 I went to a workshop offered by the Coalition of Essential Schools, the organization founded by Theodore Sizer to promote his vision of effective teaching and learning. It was being held at a school that was preparing to become an “essential school,” and Professor Sizer himself was present to answer skeptical questions from the community. He also spoke at our workshop, where he discussed the “Common Principles” that he hoped would lead schools away from conditions that force teachers to make “Horace’s Compromise,” in which the fictitious teacher Horace decides not to be too much trouble to his students if they don’t trouble him in return.

Of Sizer’s common principles all but one were framed in general or abstract terms. That one was very particular: the student – teacher ratio was not to exceed 90 – 1.  Sizer said that without that guarantee the other principles would probably prove meaningless. This fascinated me because I was at a turning-point in my (young) teaching career. I had given up working at a school where I had 130 students and was moving to one in which I would have 75. My decision to leave the first school was largely due to a conviction that had been growing in my mind: some kinds of good teaching are impossible in those conditions, particularly the effective teaching of writing.

What a difference! At the lighter-load school I could assign weekly compositions and mark them thoroughly, imitating the wonderful Mr. Levy, my Freshman Comp teacher at university. As if two riveting lessons a week were not enough, he asked his students to turn in those weekly compositions, and he worked them over. I learned more about writing in eight months with him than I had learned in the previous four years. I don’t blame my high-school teachers: they had 120 students each. The miracle was that Mr. Marmion could say as much as he did on the history papers he turned back to me, which is where I learned about writing in high school as he commented succinctly and sometimes pungently on my work. A graduate summa cum laude from the University of California at Berkeley in the days before grade inflation, he must have been accustomed to an extraordinary level of top-quality productivity.

With only 75 students other opportunities presented themselves for me to adopt the role of teacher as coach, one element of Sizer’s approach to teaching. Of course the careful marking of writing is coaching, but so is tutorial discussion with students one on one, as is Socratic discussion in class or Question Time after an oral presentation. In this kind of coaching the teacher always takes the student where he or she is, offering just the advice needed for improvement. It is not possible in any significant regular way when there are too many students.

Dr. Johnson said of poverty that “it makes some virtues impracticable and others extremely difficult.” The same can be said about poor conditions of teaching, of which one is a too high student – teacher ratio. Unfortunately, some people in the Ed Biz are not nearly as worried about impoverishing the conditions of teaching and learning as about setting up an efficient and profitable system that simulates schooling without delivering the goods. One specimen of my acquaintance used to say, after introducing yet another depredation of the conditions of teaching and teachers, “You’ll just have to work harder for less.” He used to be critical of the older teachers, referring to them as “dead wood.”

And thus we come to an important sticking-point: systems that overburden teachers are not just bad for the students; they are bad for the teachers. Such a state of things probably doesn’t bother the managers and businessmen who expect to fill their schools’ ranks with interns and Teach for America beings who will be done with teaching in five years, and it is not a problem to the one out of two new teachers who leaves the profession within the first five years, but it is a problem for schooling in general. Pace The Specimen, older teachers know some things that younger teachers do not, regardless of bright eyes and good will. But if the conditions under which they work sap their good will, those things will be of little use to anyone. What is more important, I wonder why Mr. Marmion would choose teaching as a career now. Could he support 120 students and demands made on today’s teachers that were not made on him? Could he support his family on his teacher’s salary as he did then? Could he repay his student loan, which he didn’t need when he went to Cal because it was then free? Would he accept being told that he would have to work harder for less when he was already working very hard for not much?

Harder workers may be found, and some of them, like Boxer the horse, may respond to the difficulty of their job by saying, “I must work harder.” But others will be pardoned for recalling what happened to Boxer and deciding that they really don’t want to work at Animal Farm after all.

A heap of papers and other things beckons this weekend, so I will pass up this week’s posting.

In the more than enough that has been said about Arum and Roksa’s study of learning in college, one welcome “finding” has gone almost undetected.[1] It is that students’ ability to “engage in critical thinking”  improves if they are exposed to at least one “reading-intensive course” and one “writing-intensive course” during the prior semester. The surprise is not that some students are improving against the prevailing trend. Rather, it is that this “finding” needs detecting at all.  How could we have reached the point of needing “research” to remind us of the good that can come of the careful review of students’ writing by their teachers? I think the answer is that we have retreated from recognizing and confronting the difficulty that the work entails on both student and teacher.

The first difficulty a student faces in writing instruction is a corollary of Adam’s curse which says that writing, like other labors, is laborious. Stated this way, it should be obvious; but it is shocking how many students have no idea that to make their writing good, they must work at it. That means multiple drafts. It means writing ahead of time, leaving the writing alone, and coming back to it. It means no autopiloted or semiconsciously produced writing. In more cases than not, it means no multitasking. Most difficult of all, perhaps, is the need to submit it to a teacher for judgment.

“Comments are intensely and painfully personal, being the responses that an alert reader would feel if he were encountering the essay in print. The result is that even the best students feel abashed, if not actually resentful. To which one should only say that they should resent the neglect in which all their previous teachers have left them[2].” Part of that neglect is due to the widespread belief that “peer editing” is enough to improve students’ writing. A moment’s thought will dispel that silly fiction: do students (or their parents) accept peer athletic coaching or peer doctoring? Why then should they believe that a classmate, who knows how to write no better than they, will be able to offer steady guidance? How can supposedly sensible people expect that same classmate to deliver an explicit but thoughtful and confidential reproof? I don’t say that a student’s classmates can teach him nothing, but it’s a long way from that to saying that they can teach him all or most of what he needs to know.

This view of the teacher’s vital place jibes precisely with Arun and Roksa’s other finding about learning in college: students are more likely to learn to think when they have teachers with high expectations. To expect much means more than to set big reading and writing loads that can be counterfeited or ignored. The teacher who really means business in a “writing-intensive” course will go over a student’s writing as a critic.

This means more than correcting grammar and spelling, which Barzun says is of secondary importance to examining words and tone. An imperfect knowledge of word usage and a tin ear for tone do not yield the wiggly green lines of MS Word^® or respond to grading by machine[3]. Here is where the difficulty for the teacher comes in. It is threefold: being alive to every word a student says requires painstaking attention, making comments is a slog, and toeing the line between letting a student off too easily and beating him down takes “perpetual discretion.”  It means more than writing “v. good A,” “awk,” or “wc”: “images are changed, synonyms proposed, and bad sentences recast, sometimes in alternative ways, in order to show precisely how the original misleads and how clarity is to be reached.” This learned, Strunk and White may follow.

A tall order! The student must be diligent and receptive, ready to retain and build on what has been practiced and understood. He should have been encouraged in these virtues first by his parents and then by his prior teachers, none of whom should have made the way false or easy by excuses or special pleas. It should then go without saying that schools and colleges must work for the establishment of the needed relationship between student and teacher. A few principles follow:

1.     Use people, not machines, to teach and to grade writing in a “writing-intensive” course.

2.     Use people to teach “reading-intensive” courses in which the students’ understanding is confirmed and probed by Socratic questioning.

3.     Ensure that teachers understand their duties, including that teaching is a primary responsibility.

4.     Ensure that students understand their duties, including the acceptance of advice, correction, and other coaching as well as didactic instruction.

4.     Minimize high-stakes testing that can be gamed, and do not attach consequential decision-making to test results.

5.     Do not attach retention, promotion and tenure decisions to students’ ratings of their teachers.

This last needs some explanation. It is hard to believe that perverse consequences were not anticipated to the widespread practice by colleges of making decisions to retain or promote teachers based on students’ ratings of them. If Mommy’s little instrumentalist is at college not to become acquainted and fall in love with learning but to get a meal ticket, he or she will probably want not the most thorough but the easiest credential possible. Hence the phenomenon of students’ giving bad ratings to teachers who make “excessive demands” (i.e., any rigorous demands at all). At many of these colleges the ratings are followed by firings. The teachers who survive this “rating” system are the ones who collaborate in the corruption of students by winks and nods at what they are doing.

And what about the students treated thus? If their parents and their prior teachers have failed them, if Mom & Dad make excuses for them, if they themselves have not cultivated the discipline of work, if they do not know how to read carefully, if they have not learned how to write effectively, and if they think that a teacher who taxes them with work and responsibility is an enemy instead of an ally, what will become of them?

If someone told you that a counterfeiter should be pardoned because he was clever enough to make 20s that fooled a change machine the speaker had designed, you would be right to start laughing—or to check your pocket to see that your wallet was still in it before he left the room.  I’m torn, then, between laughter and looking for my wallet when I read a report that the makers of the e-Rater essay grading machine think students capable of gaming it are demonstrating higher-level thinking anyway, and so should be allowed a pass.

For it turns out that the machine can be gamed, though a thoughtful person could have anticipated the game. A critic might have guessed that a problem would crop up in the manufacturer’s substitution of inane machine-gradable proxy values for the human power of recognizing, let us say, stylish complexity or depth, which a good essay might be expected to have. The proxy values reward no such thing, for they can’t detect it. Instead, they reward long sentences, big words, and five-sentence paragraphs, which good writing has, except when it hasn’t.

To see a different but related example of the problem of proxy values in rating, you can substitute for an e-Rater your computer’s Flesch-Kincaid Readability Tool and experience how it can misgrade the readability of a piece of writing. If you download Shakespeare’s Sonnet LX (“Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore”) and scan it with F-K, you will “find” that it gives the sonnet a 2^nd-grade “readability.” To test the value of that “judgment,” go ahead and share the poem with your second graders and see how long the discussion lasts.

The marking machine also has a tin ear and is a sucker for lies, as we might have expected. If presented the five samples of awful writing that open George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language,” it would probably pass them. Hence, sentences like this one by Lancelot Hogben

Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder.

would get a pass even though Orwell’s dismissal of it has become justly famous: “He is playing ducks and drakes with a battery that can write prescriptions.”

Les Perelman, a director of writing at MIT, reports that he has had some other revealing fun with the e-Rater and can now offer advice on how to fool it. Since e-Rater prefers big words, he says, he advises gamers to use “egregious” rather than “bad” as Hogben does (though Hogben’s sample is a rich lode of other fool’s gold too). He also says you can write nonsense so long as it “looks” as if it has been written well. He argued in one top-scored essay that universities are going broke because they overpay their teaching assistants, who go off on private jets to South Seas holidays. Who knows? It might even pass an essay claiming that Joel Klein respects teachers or that No Child Left Behind leaves no child behind.

I recently had a wonderful letter from a former student who had graduated magna cum laude from her university. A remarkable student, she avidly learned English, which was not her native language, and she did very well in Theory of Knowledge, which was not in her “comfort zone,” as she put it. Nonetheless, she said that her English and ToK studies still have “resonating effects” on her.

I mention this not because I revel in incense-burning by former students (though incense is pleasantly fragrant) but because my former student went to Penn’s Wharton School, where she undertook a double major in finance and computer science engineering. This is not the first time I have had a good word come back to me from a business student about studying Theory of Knowledge, and I think it illustrates some important features of good education. They are in danger of being forgotten in a public rhetoric that focuses on narrow results, narrow measures of accountability, and impersonality in how learning is “delivered.”

The effects of a good education on a receptive student are long-lasting, dynamic, varied, and hard to predict—or to “measure.” We should not disparage the transfer effect. Indeed, we had better trust it, for it is of vital importance in a world both where education matters and where things change rapidly. I have argued that the study of literature and of the work of first-rate thinkers who are also good writers can be like an ideal conversation, which is not just entertaining but also beneficial and educative. My own undergraduate education has lasted nearly forty-five years, for I rarely spend a week when I don’t go back in some significant way to the terrain that I first scouted in college. It was bigger than I thought. My former student says, “I continue to value philosophy, and I continue to look forward to challenges rather than staying in comfort zones.” She will do well not because reading Hardy, James, or St. Anselm was relevant or irrelevant to finance and computer engineering but because the liberal education of which they were a part made possible a capacity and plasticity of intellect that allowed her to absorb and understand disparate material and to make sense of a young life that has been intense and varied.

It should then be obvious that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in value added metrics. I hate to beat a horse that should have a death certificate pinned on its decaying rump, but there are a lot of people that keep carrying the corpse around and acting as if riding it will get us somewhere. The reason to despise VAM (and their agents GERM, NCLB and RAT) is not that teachers’ unions are against them, but that they are empty measurements and don’t get at what education is about or what seems to trouble it in much of the U. S. I am not going to review all the arguments that have been made (those interested may thumb through my past postings, visit Diane Ravitch’s website, or read articles by the New York Times reporter Michael Winerip), but it is disheartening, after studying these arguments and finding them persuasive, to discover that noted columnists are still rallying around this zombie warhorse. It is simply impossible to credit, as one of them does, the value of “discovering” what ails university education by testing entering freshmen and emerging sophomores to find out how good they are at buying airplanes[1]! My former student would consider it absurd. She had other things to do than be a make-believe purchasing agent in order to see whether her professors were “delivering” value for money.

There is something valuable—I would say essential—in the personal ties that make good teaching and learning possible, whether in high school or in college. These ties, shaped by feeling and by the conventions of the student-teacher relationship in a culture where education is valued, are overlooked in the current quality hubbub. Though it is hard to say just what the signs of such ties should be, I instance a few examples. I have mentioned students who write or return to school to thank their teachers.  Teachers also receive notes from students thanking them for writing college recommendations or conducting interviews for admission to a university. In some places it is traditional to give presents of nominal value to teachers. In China I have seen Teachers’ Day cards.  Richard Lanham in his Handlist of Rhetorical Terms notes a kind of composition called padeuteria, a poem originating in ancient Greece thanking a teacher for what the writer has learned, or thanking God for teachers. Professor Lanham says drily of this kind of composition that it is a “genre which has often suffered from neglect.” If you look up this word in an American dictionary, you will not find it. That may tell us more than value-added metrics.

Sometimes a small experience can tell us about a big picture. That is one of the lessons of a superb three-day workshop I just concluded, though another lesson is notable too. It is that a good workshop can do wonders for one’s professional development. I say that who have survived some really dreadful workshops in which not only did I learn nothing, but I came away a dispirited or angry teacher: Someone spent good money and I spent my precious time for that?

But the workshop I just attended left me a sense of accomplishment and learning rather than that unfortunately familiar feeling we often get after a conference—something like the feeling a mark gets after being bilked in a confidence game. But this was no confidence game; it was solid throughout. How did it happen? What do I conclude from it?

It took place in a country that has been working hard and successfully for a number of years to improve the quality of its teachers, though many of my classmates, highly experienced teachers, were also eminently qualified. Note 1: the participants in a good workshop, though not omniscient, are experts in their profession, and are treated as such.

The participants had given up three days of their Easter holiday and expected something solid in return for time lost. Note 2: A good teacher gives precious time and in return expects precious learning and experience. Note 3: A good workshop leader anticipates high professional expectations and sets out to meet them.

The material being covered, the new English A Literature course of the International Baccalaureate program, was developed over a period of years in a truly collaborative effort embracing specialists and classroom teachers as genuine partners rather than handed down by ukase. In Finland this would be the standard procedure since its teachers are seen as respected and knowledgeable professionals and are expected as a matter of course to develop and shape the curricula they teach. One of the main participants in the development of this course was our presenter, a working classroom teacher. Note 4: Good workshops are connected to good programs. Note 5: Good programs are the result of collaboration among professional equals, not the result of imposition by managers unconnected with the classroom.

I couldn’t help contrasting this workshop with those at the last teachers’ conference I attended. At that conference no working teachers gave workshops; neither I nor my colleagues carried away anything particularly memorable or applicable to our work lives. Note 6: Good workshops for teachers are led by teachers.

The workshop was live and required constant face-to-face collaboration among the participants in real time. I had recently experienced an on-line workshop in another course with a world-famous expert in that course. She was good, but I got much, much less out of three weeks of clicking and tapping and strands and pages than I did out of three days of genuine meetings. Note 7: Good workshops (and indeed good courses everywhere that demand more than the simplest grunt-work) are live, not on line.

The work that took place at the workshop bore directly on the classrooms in which the English A Literature course would actually be taught and was intended to help teachers succeed in teaching that course. Note 8: A good workshop has a specific focus on particular knowledge and understanding, and it seeks particular results in a particular place: the classroom.

The English A Literature course has specific criteria for success (and, yes, failure). The participants in this workshop looked at actual essays and listened to actual oral presentations with the aim of understanding and applying the criteria of success to those “performances.” After marking them we discussed each one thoroughly, criterion by criterion. Note 9: A good workshop discussing “quality” and standards must explicitly and thoroughly treat those standards in live and collaborative ways.

The workshop presenter, one of the two or three best I have ever seen, constantly referred his own remarks and ours back to his own classroom experience and ours. The laboratory, the experimental classroom, and the showroom never entered his discussion or ours. Neither did any “technology,” gadget, or software except in connection with solving particular classroom problems. He was not a promoter or a pitchman for a system, a theory, or a product. Note 10: The originators, promoters, and marketers of particular theories, software, and products should be banned from workshops because workshops are not Tupperware parties. Note 11: The best way to communicate workable innovation is through natural word of mouth untainted by “tipping-point vanguards” and other marketing tools. Note 12: Branding and marketing have no business in education. “Representatives” of commercial enterprises should be turned away at the door.

The presenter spoke ordinary English that was remarkably free of jargon, except the course’s necessary terms of art, which teachers had already internalized. Note 13: Ordinary language is an extraordinary joy, but a necessary one. Note 14: Surely teachers who expect their students to know and speak good English may expect their workshop leaders to do so as well.

My school’s I. B. Coordinator approved my participation in this workshop because he supports his teachers’ needs and wants them to do their best. He did not approve it because he thought I would like to take a trip. Note 15: Good workshops have participants who attend workshops for the right reasons and are supported wholeheartedly by their schools’ administration.

One of my more popular postings appeared exactly eighteen months ago. For the holiday I offer it again here.

The best and most versatile classroom I taught in was the emptiest one, the one with the most usable space inside and nearby, the one with the least of mandated clutter, the one with the fewest gadgets. It also had highly rearrangeable furniture that could be adapted to any number of needs.

(My desk, a hand-me-down from a principal, was the size of an aircraft carrier. That was inconvenient. Even its spacious desktop, seemingly a blessing, was a trap, tending to swallow up small or even not-so-small items and to allow the formation of geological features if neglected. The way I handled the inconvenience of the desk was to put it at one end of the room and ignore it whenever possible. I didn’t teach from it.)

A bad classroom is not necessarily a cheap classroom, nor is an excellent one necessarily expensive. The question I have of any classroom is Will you adapt to the needs of the lessons given, or must the teacher adapt his lessons to your design? The more the classroom’s features are fixed or assembled, the less they can be harmonized with a teacher’s plan.

If a course is going to embrace Socratic discussion, a conference table would be ideal, but in a flexible classroom serving a number of pedagogical purposes there can’t be such a big thing. My classroom had small tables shaped in half-hexagons and free-standing chairs. The tables could be arranged in a somewhat ungainly but workable ring that served as a conference table, and that was the “default setting” of the classroom, or its arrangement at rest. Everyone was in the front row: the perfect setting for colloquia, seminars, and the spotting of surreptitious texting and game-playing. And, if needed, I could get up to make a point, come into the center of the “table,” and do a little theater-in-the-round.

I sometimes put a hexagon in the center for demonstrations. After my Theory of Knowledge classes had read about the “need to know” in José Ortega y Gasset, I would have them gather around the hexagon, and I would throw five dice, playing “Petals around the Rose”. The class’s task was to figure out how I got the number that I called out after each roll. Students who didn’t need to know could sit on the periphery, but most had an interest, and some became obsessed. It becomes easier to understand how Andrew Wiles could take eight years to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem if you have had a problem eat away at you and just had to solve it.

Sometimes the room filled with hexagons, or at any rate the conference table divided in pieces. The I. B. English A1 students had to study poems and a Shakespeare play in detail, and their examination was a twelve-minute talk given in private to the teacher after having been prepared in twenty minutes on an extract from one of the works studied. The presentation was followed by three minutes of questions and answers or conversation with the teacher. The students were not to know which extract they would speak on, and they could not use books or any notes prepared by them before the examination. It was a daunting challenge, and one thing they had to be able to do was talk in their own words about what they had read. The ideas had to be their own, not downloaded ones. How else to have this happen but get the kids to work over the poems in detail and talk about them with each other and me, taking notes as they worked? The classes would break into small groups with guiding questions set by me. After studying the poems or play at home, they discussed them with each other, taking notes on their work and answering my questions. I would stroll around the class, “eavesdropping,” as I put it, on their endeavors, guiding as needed. Of course, where a lecture became necessary I could talk to the class as a whole, re-establishing the conference table or having them face the blackboard, where I would write things down.

The whiteboard was available for what used to be called blackboard work by students, who would come up and write answers, solve problems, or fix bad sentences. Students usually enjoy that and feel a bit of an edge knowing that they are going to produce an answer in writing in front of their classmates. Whiteboard work also gives the more fidgety and restless students a chance to do something. (They are the same students who volunteer to pass out dictionaries and to rearrange tables: at last a break from sitting down.)

I could use a collapsible lectern, too, for formal speeches, and have the class face the speaker. This minimalist classroom had no facilities for Power Point talks, which I liked. Power Point has a way of homogenizing discourse, and it diverts attention from the speaker. (My colleague the geography teacher had a New Yorker cartoon posted on his classroom door. An executive devil in hell is interviewing a job-applicant devil, who is sitting attentively. The executive devil says, “I need someone well versed in the arts of torture. Do you know Power Point?”) It is also frustrating to have the almost inevitable delays as things that don’t work properly have to be fixed. Time is short and knowledge is great, and we don’t need this.

Along one side of the room was a counter at above-knee height. At one end was the classroom’s computer. In the center were reference books: a classroom set of hardbound “college dictionaries,” the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Fowler, a thesaurus (old-fashioned arrangement), the American Heritage Dictionary, The King’s English by Kingsley Amis, and Modern American Usage by Wilson Follett (and edited by Jacques Barzun, Carlos Baker, Dudley Fitts, James Hart, Phyllis McGinley, and Lionel Trilling!). I also had a set of national flags the size of index cards, each on a small pole with a stand. Students would place their national flag in a display area on the counter. I usually had between thirty and forty flags on display.

But all this could be swept aside at need. 9^th-graders did set designs of The Admirable Crichton or The Miracle Worker and had the choice of 2- or 3-D designs. The 3-D designs, sometimes really elaborate constructions, had to rest on the counter during their period of display. (All of them were judged for faithfulness to stage directions and artistic flair by the art teacher and me.) And sometimes students used the counter as part of a classroom stage.

We also used space outside the classroom. On one side was a walk shaded by very large lilac trees and an apple tree, good places for practicing scenes or working up notes on poems. On the other was a quadrangle of lawn with two or three shade trees. A walk up to the next building had a balcony that could be used for, say, Balcony Scenes. I had two pairs of students volunteer to learn and enact the entire Balcony Scene from Romeo and Juliet instead of doing smaller excerpts. One of the boys even wore a doublet and hose (“those pouffy things and tights”) for the show. When students chose to do the Breakfast Table Scene from The Miracle Worker, we could use a large nearby porch and have pitchers of water and a bowl of scrambled eggs from the cafeteria. The whole thing could be hosed down after the show. Students working on scenes from plays could work outdoors, staying out of each other’s hair and keeping their presentations at least a bit under wraps. The seniors, in the run-up to their I. B. exams, could work under the shade-trees on their final review. I would circulate among the groups, making suggestions and telling them stuff I thought they needed to know.

The ranks-and-files devotees might think that this would be an inchoate jumble, but it was not. They might also wonder whether  students bothered those in neighboring classrooms, and here too the answer was (usually) not. After a period of some years, a competent teacher learns how to manage things by being subtly omnipresent and taking a dozen pulses more or less simultaneously. For their part, students who have the modicum of manners and sense not to turn a flexible system into a barroom brawl or a donnybrook appreciate the chance to have flexibility in their classroom and lessons. So did I.

One of the annoyances of working in the profession of teacher is the widespread notion not just that anyone can do it but that people with little or no experience in education can speak authoritatively about it. Hence the thousands of students who would not be allowed in an operating theater without years of schooling, internship, and residency being sent not just to classrooms but to tough classrooms to teach after five weeks of preparation.

And hence the pronouncements of outsiders on what schools need to do, which are treated with respect or at least polite interest rather than allowed to sink into the oblivion that is their due. Such is a report by a panel led by Condoleeza Rice and the egregious Joel Klein. Will Rice succeed in bringing to education what she brought to Iraq and Afghanistan? We cannot say yet, but we do have some information about Klein’s tenure in education. A lawyer by profession, he spent some time interloping in New York City schools with programs like Basic Literacy and Value Added Learning.

Fresh from these triumphs, the two reveal the humanity that underlies their philosophy of education by referring to children as “human capital.” Always suspicious of anyone who thinks of people by using mass nouns, I am doubly suspicious of these two and their breathtaking proposal that the government should develop a national security readiness audit to judge whether schools are meeting “targets” in preparing their human capital for—for what? National security? It used to be enough to want life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Will we have another audit on top of the No Child Left Behind audits? Those are already so unsuccessful that the Feds are handing out waivers, conditional on the recipients’ joining the RAce to the Top (RAT) and its audits. At what point will RAT waivers start appearing? And now we are going to have a third audit? Just what we need: three tiers of junk statistics instead of judgment and “perpetual discretion.”

Can we be living in the same country that was inhabited by Jacques Barzun, Abraham Maslow, and Richard Hofstadter? Barzun’s seminal Teacher in America came after ten months of visiting schools not to gather data but to share in experience. His book was not a tabulation but an explanation, not a theory but a synthesis of teaching as it happens. Maslow devised his Hierarchy of Needs with no data at all. (Subsequent generations of scholars are grateful to him for that: they could make entire academic careers gathering the data that showed he was more or less right.) Richard Hofstadter wrote chapters like “The Road to Life Adjustment” without surveys or stack searches. Indeed, he somewhat uncharitably referred to scholars who dig details and data instead of thinking as “archive rats.”

I suggest that good thinkers with their eye to what is really going on in the classroom can make more sensible suggestions about should be going on there than will a couple of educationists-manqués who think education is a form of capital accumulation.