Author: Greg

The death of Professor Piero Weiss, a concert pianist and gifted teacher, at the age of 83 saddened me and sent me back in time. My college required (and still requires) its students to take a class that surveys Western music from plainsong to the 20^th Century. I was officially enrolled in another teacher’s section of that class. The other teacher, now at Bard College, was good and enthusiastic; and I credit him with opening my ears to Mozart. But my classmates enrolled in Professor Weiss’s class kept praising him and inviting me to audit his lessons.

I found, when I started auditing, that my classmates had not oversold him. He often set the classroom aroar, whether with laughter at his bone-dry jokes delivered with a George-Burnsian cigar in hand or with applause at his wonderful “examples” played on the classroom’s “not altogether satisfactory” piano. He opened my ears to Schubert, his favorite composer, and propelled me through Carnegie Hall to a lifelong appreciation of a great pianist, the recently retired Alfred Brendel.

William James in his Talks to Teachers reads from Charles Darwin that he had a great regret in life: he had not spent more time “listening to music and looking at pictures” because of these activities’ beneficial effects, of which he felt deprived. I have been fortunate both to live much of my life in places with music nearby and to have had my interest in listening to music kindled by teachers like Professor Weiss. We must therefore also regret the passing of music education, whether in playing or in appreciation, at so many schools.

We must simultaneously and I think with a degree of anger deplore the movement in education towards teaching software, which along with everything else that is happening to schools across the United States is lessening students’ chances of learning at the feet of a superb teacher. The anger that inflames this regret is due to the wish of companies selling the software to make a profit even if their “products” do not do any better than a traditional textbook taught by a live teacher, and to ignore or misrepresent the evidence of these unspectacular results.

And, according to a New York Times article published yesterday, that is just what the Education Department’s What Works Clearinghouse has determined in its analysis of studies of various brands of software’s effectiveness. It turns out that most of the studies finding a benefit in teaching software have not been conducted under properly rigorous protocols. What is more, the software being sold costs in some cases three times as much as the textbooks it is meant to replace.

To judge by the extract from a mechanized math lesson in the Times, the software might have some value in the remedial instruction of students who lack the basics, and I would like to see the results of some studies done to assess its helpfulness in those circumstances. But it’s hard to see how such elementary material will help any students get airborne, much less soar.

It is also hard to see how schools whose IT resources are underfunded, scrappy, and unreliable will be able to run complex and sophisticated programs for large numbers of students. Better to leave instruction in the hands of experienced teachers with their “perpetual discretion” (and their cigars) than in an IT system with down syndrome. That is, of course, if all the concomitant cutting of teachers’ pay and benefits does not reduce them to the level where the only people that can be hired as teachers are, as Richard Hofstadter put it, “drifters and misfits.”

 

A former colleague of mine recently had to endure a teachers’ meeting that featured a staple of bad “training,” the Motivational Speaker. These people blow through town like airborne smells, leaving trace elements behind. (Every now and then an exception proves the rule: I once had the pleasure of hearing Diane Ravitch address a conference I was attending. Unfortunately, she was offering pungency not perfume that day, and left too many noses wrinkled and out of joint. Pity.)

Why do American educators go for these people? I think the taste goes back to the days of the Chautauqua meeting or tent meeting at which one could have one’s psychic engine revved for an hour or so by a famed tent meeting speaker. Yet these meetings must have become popular in answer to a need already felt. I am not sure what the need was or is, but Tocqueville said he found Americans restless in the midst of their prosperity because they were always thinking of “the good things they have not got.” Maybe the Motivational Speaker by his emollient words quells for a while that rooted unease. The phenomenon of such speakers at teachers’ training meetings is not to be found in India, Finland, China, or Hong Kong. I think that in addition to having a peculiarly American genesis, such speakers will prove to be harbingers of a peculiarly American “solution” (what a word!) to the difficulty of education.

At my colleague’s meeting the Speaker’s topic was the need to be open to change. Now, a principle of life as a teacher is that when someone says in a kind voice, “Be open to change,” you can bet another, less kind, voice will follow in due course saying, “Assume the position.” But there is more than that, though that should be more than enough.

Some time ago I wrote about the appeal of junk education, and I think that appeal is growing stronger. People running many school districts are going to be faced with four problems: 1) uncertain funding or under-funding, 2) conversion of schooling to a business model that includes executive compensation packages for its “Chief Executives,” 3) competition between public and charter schools, and 4) the need to yield low-grade “learning” as a “product”–a yield that can be corroborated by multiple-choice tests standing proxy for real learning that encompasses knowledge, skill, and understanding. Junk education would then take its place in schools where software and programs and apps (Oh, my!) have replaced the “perpetual discretion” shown by traditional teachers. Eventually all this stuff will be in The Cloud and not even need a high-tech management and troubleshooting team in situ.

If, perish the thought, I am right in this line of thinking, today’s teachers will need to be open to a change of teaching to a kind of oversight role in the “delivery” of this kind of “instruction.” That being the case, if you should find yourself called to a meeting where you are invited to  “be open to change,” look out for that second voice behind.

 

We must regret the recent passing of Dr. Vito Perrone, who in North Dakota and at Harvard rejected the view of teaching and learning as industrial processes. There are fewer like him left, though one hopes the incipient fiasco in No Child Left Behind education will change that. In particular, he rejected the exaltation of standardized testing, the Aeaea of contemporary education’s daft and flighty odyssey.

Those on this odyssey are daft because they steer away from what many educators already know about teaching and learning, including many things of proven value: otherwise how could the decreasing number of schools that still offer solid education do what they are doing? And they steer towards “solutions” (what a word!) offered by sorry wizards[1] with incantations borrowed from industrial systems and business jargon.

If these “solutions” were the only or the best possible ones, then charter schools led by “CEO”s would be sweeping the field. Unfortunately, as Diane Ravitch has pointed out, the evidence shows that charter schools generally do no better than public schools except when doped with funding from private foundations. Also unfortunately, these new schools of dubious value are muscling in on the terrain long claimed by Catholic education, which has for years taught children in poor urban neighborhoods effectively and comparatively cheaply.

Even the Times’s writer of the obituary for Dr. Perrone falls under the wizards’ enchantment, for he has been beguiled into describing teaching as a “process” and speaks of it as something that might be “streamlined” by standardized testing, at least in the view of those who have adopted the tests. But except at the lowest grunt level of basic organization, teaching is not a process because understanding doesn’t proceed, it occurs. We have real teachers with Professor Barzun’s “perpetual discretion” and, by contrast, we have data entry clerks with their procedures manuals.

More sadly, he refers to Dr. Perrone as “the conscience of the profession in the modern era.” While I have no doubt that Dr. Perrone was a voice of sanity and right-mindedness in our profession, I also have no doubt that it has many, many consciences and has had for years. The sad thing is that these consciences—these sound thinkers, too—are going unheard.

 

 

Can it be true that the best writer of an entire century wrote on education? If you have taken a graduate degree in education or received a teaching credential, you will have your doubts; but when asked who was the best writer of English prose in the 19^th century, James Joyce said John Henry Newman, the author of The Idea of a University.

Part of the book is a discussion of whether a liberal education is useful[1], with Newman maintaining that it is. I find it worth reading for a number of reasons.

The first is the refreshing idea that education can reform itself while preserving the best of what it has already done well. Usually, when we read educationist reform literature we hear glib talk about revolutions, paradigm shifts, and ash heaps of history. The historical background of Newman’s book was the reform of Oxford from its time of decline, castigated by Gibbon, to its return to the forefront of teaching and learning. The decline was reversed, but no one threw out the baby with the bathwater, and, mirabile dictu, no one thought the reform needed to be based on research.

The second is that Newman thought his case worth making by using the very methods cultivated in a liberal education: critical intelligence, sharp reasoning, clear prose, the presentation of vivid particulars, and other solid but transparent means available to those given a solid general education. When the argument is so made, it stands before any generally educated person for approval or rejection. How different from the methods used by specialists in the “science” and “research” of education, conceived obscurely and written poorly.

The third is the writing itself. Newman, like many past masters of English, had an expansive view of what the sentence could do, and therefore let it expand, contract, or ramify depending on the job each one had to do. Readers of work by Sir Isaiah Berlin will recognize a kinship of Newman’s and Berlin’s prose styles. (Let me say here that I have assigned Berlin to 11^th– and 12^th-graders, who after an initial startlement at his style, find themselves slowly but increasingly able to work their way through sentences fitted precisely to the thoughts they convey.) The following is an extract of two sentences from Newman’s “discourse.” One, elaborately but soundly and correctly constructed, makes an argument by precise analogy. The other summarizes.

“Again, as health ought to precede labour of the body, and as a man in health can do what an unhealthy man cannot do, and as of this health the properties are strength, energy, agility, graceful carriage and action, manual dexterity, and endurance of fatigue, so in like manner general culture of mind is the best aid to professional and scientific study, and educated men can do what illiterate cannot; and the man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist, or an antiquarian, but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to, or any other for which he has a taste or special talent, with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger. In this sense then, …  mental culture is emphatically useful.”

The means of persuasion are entirely generalist and transparent. The reader of this sentence has nothing more special to do than get it: no protocol to evaluate, no proxy values to examine and vet, no imprecision of language to clarify. Instead, we are called on to use what William James calls our sagacity and what Blaise Pascal calls esprit de finesse to weigh and judge what Newman says.

They are the same faculties of mind that, having cultivated in a good education, a graduate student can then apply in turning to a specific calling such as the law, business, architecture, or education. They will increase and complement advanced special knowledge with skill and the potential for understanding that a trained and agile mind possesses.

They are the same faculties of mind that a good high school education will also start to develop.

 

My high-school humanities class once had to read an essay by Joseph Wood Krutch called “Eternity or the Franklin Stove.”  We made some fun of Professor Krutch’s name and then got down to reading the essay. Though its subject matter can be guessed from the title, I don’t remember it nearly as well as I do the towering rage it provoked in a classmate of mine, who thought him a backward-looking technophobic bigoted old fart.

That same friend, Franklin stove enthusiast that he was, had been doing some garage work in the then infant study of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Another high school friend, also a computer buff, was one of the first people I knew or heard of to have his own personal computer, which he built himself soon after graduating from university in the early seventies. (Its “hard drive” was a tape!) The Eternity camp included two recent students of mine. One did his I. B. Extended Essay (EE) based on six months of planetary observations made from a friendly neighborhood university telescope. Astronomy is, of course, one of the Seven Liberal Arts, which seem to have had a tenure as close to eternal as anything in our civilization, telescopes having been a happy and useful innovation in its history. I did not supervise this essay, but I did supervise that of another student, who did a wonderful, and indeed original, contrast of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on will. (Both essays got a grade of A, which the IB does not often give to EEs.)

The point of these examples is that the opposition of Old Farts and Futurists or Machinists and Metaphysicists is at best not very helpful and at worst artificial and invidious. We would do especially well not to cultivate it in education. There should be a place in schools for students who build their own hardware, who stargaze, and who explore the writing of great thinkers of the past. Some educators, like the late Theodore Sizer, thought that culminating assessments could embrace all sorts of study in many different subjects. Indeed, it should do so, for most high-school students are not yet, and should not yet be, specialists. That truth is one thing that a liberal arts education has always recognized, which is why Ivy League and other good undergraduate liberal arts programs generally put off specialism and vocations or professional education till grad school.

All of this is not to say that a student should be discouraged from investigating a topic in comparative depth within the matrix of a recognized discipline. That is what the EE does, but with some freedom given to the student, who chooses the subject and topic of the essay, presumably on something he or she wants to study, and is given light supervision in its production. Under these conditions—breadth of choice, lightness of supervision, and flexibility of apparatus—a try at detailed study is undoubtedly a very good thing for a high-school student. Good or bad, the assignment of a big paper carries a great danger with it: that the student will write a shoddy piece of junk.

A writer for The New York Times thinks that one reason why research papers are often so awful is that the form itself may discourage the enthusiasm of its practitioners. While I think she may have something there, I would hedge her thoughts very carefully. Research must be done and reported, but the problem of lousy writing probably goes deeper than format.

A friend of mine in university, taking an introductory literature course, was required by his professor to write a 35-page paper on Yeats’s “Circus Animals’ Desertion.” There is simply no way that a change of medium to blog or the introduction of a wiki audience would alter the fundamental looniness of such an assignment given to a nineteen-year-old undergraduate. Roy Foster, Richard Ellmann, and Michael Rosenthal didn’t write about this poem for 35 pages. What was the professor thinking? It is a wonderful poem, and I have had classes burst into applause after hearing it read aloud, but this kind of assignment is sure to undermine fascination or excitement and replace it with loathing in all but the most dedicated specialists, and maybe even in them. That most undergraduates, let alone high-school students, are not and cannot be such dedicated scholars suggests that the problem of research papers will not be solved by using modern media and forms of discourse if the professors’ demands are greater than what the students can reasonably produce–or, let it be said, if the subject is appallingly dull.

The Times writer also notes that the students of a professor she knows write well for their blogs and social networking but badly for her. She then naïvely proposes that this is because teachers demand work in antiquated media. I think that, as he so often does, William James has an explanation of this phenomenon, and it has nothing to do with modern vs. ancient media. He says that an individual “has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups.” How each social self acts depends on how he cares for the opinion of the group that sees it.

I have written elsewhere about the need of affective ties between teacher and student to promote understanding, and I would add that if a teacher wants good writing from a student, he or she will have to be in one of the “groups about whose opinion [the student] cares.” It has little to do with the medium in which the teacher insists that the student work. One important reason why students write well for their classmates but badly for their teachers is that they care for their classmates but don’t care for their teachers.

We might say that a student would surely be ashamed to write badly if he could write well, but shame depends on a sense of honor, and, as James says, honor “is his image in the eyes of his own ‘set,’ which exalts or condemns him as he conforms or not to certain requirements that may not be made of one in another walk of life.” Here James is not talking just about one’s friends, but about any group with whom one makes a significant identification.

I would say that the reporter’s friend has a problem not with wrong media but with students who have not taken on their teachers as a group about whose opinion they care. I mean care, not “have a certain minimal prudential regard.” The “Franklin stove” problem of how to mediate one’s ideas and imagination must be solved in tandem with the “eternity” problem of understanding human nature and how our feelings drive our learning.

 

Those of us who love the movie Lawrence of Arabia remember Lawrence’s surprise attack on the coastal town of Aqaba after a brave crossing of the Nafūd Desert. I was thinking about the Nafūd, which I had driven around in 1979, and as the stream of my consciousness moved unaccountably to memories of my teacher education, I remembered a course taught by a Chinese-American man who was the principal of a school in a nearby city.

Mr. C offered insights into school administration (the ostensible subject of the course) and his life as the son of a Chinese father. In the pre-grade-inflation days when he went to school, a B was a respectable if not ideal grade, but for Mr. C’s father a B didn’t exist: the only possible grade was an A. He said it was typical of Chinese parents to insist on proficiency, but he also said that another explanation of Chinese students’ success in academics was the inculcation of an implicit bargain with the system: “You tell us the rules, and we will play the game.”

This view jibes with a more recent one[1] by Amy Chuan, a Chinese-American mother who also would not tolerate Bs and insisted on playing the game: “If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen,” she said, “the devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.” Even discounted for some wry hyperbole, this is the testimony of a parent who plays the game. She certainly isn’t criticizing test-based education if she coaches her children with spare tests to get their scores up. And to judge by reactions to the book, whatever else she may be, she has an uncommon determination to see her daughters become proficient at taking them.

An acceptance of the need for success in test-based education also informs the view of a report recently released by the “Education School Project,” which notes that “states now set minimum acceptable achievement levels, the highest in history, that students must attain, and mandate testing regimens to assess whether students are actually meeting state standards[2].” What is more, “all students are expected to achieve these outcomes,” which are usually described as “proficiency.”

There are riddles here. San Francisco’s famous Lowell High School, a public “magnet” school, admits students on the basis of academic records and performance on an admission test. Nearly 60% of its students are from families of Asian backgrounds. Lowell is in this respect a microcosm of California, where Asians constitute between 40 and 55% of the students at the nine University of California campuses, though they constitute only 12% of California’s population. It would seem that not only do they “play the game,” as Mr. C. would say; their play is proficient. Riddle number one: why is this so? But riddle number two lies in a decision by the University of California to revise its admission procedures in 2012 to reduce the number of SAT subject tests required for admission and to lower the number of students whose positions will be guaranteed by test results. Why have they done so if what matters is performance on tests?

The riddles do not stop at Sather Gate[3]. The report on teacher education mentioned above gives a puzzling reason for improving the US’s largely deplorable teachers’ colleges[4]. It is that “information societies seek common outcomes” and mediocre or old-fashioned preparation leaves teachers unfit to produce common outcomes. Riddle number three: what were the teachers (and the parents!) of the past doing in the 2,500 years before we became an information society in order to produce the outcomes of students at Lowell High School, or for that matter, the Academy, or Amy Chuan’s children, or Mr. C? Were the teachers (and parents) involved somehow culpable because not everyone ended up proficient? (And, by the bye, a riddle of final cause: why should mediocrity in teacher education become unacceptable because it runs counter to the needs of an information society? Whose needs, including those of “prior” societies, does mediocrity not run counter to?)

If doing well on tests were the be all and end all, why would the University of California decide to downplay test results? Why would Amy Chuan insist with equal vigor that her daughters get As on tests and that they become proficient at Chopin? Why would UC’s requirements stay changed in spite of Asian-Americans’ objections that the rules of the game were being altered? Why do many first-rate colleges accept evidence of applicants’ qualities other than their test scores? Why do a few[5] not even look at test scores? Is “the game” more complex than simplistic mythologies make it?

See the last paragraph of this posting of mine for a brief discussion of part of what I think is involved in helping a student achieve understanding. If I am right, the Road to Universal Proficiency on Tests will be harder than Lawrence’s way to Aqaba. I mean not just his actual way, but also the mythic one portrayed in Lawrence of Arabia, for the victory did not happen as shown. There is no place called the Devil’s Anvil near Aqaba, which is hundreds of kilometers from the Nafūd, a desert of shifting sands unlike what the movie shows. The reason Lawrence’s victory at Aqaba persists as a myth of endurance and success is not that people don’t have the right information about it; it is that the broad outline of the story is true and inspiring and that Lawrence’s achievement was uncommon. We the commonalty will find many very non-mythical Devil’s Anvils along our way to universal proficiency.

Two strands of school maladministration converge in the scandal of cheating within the Atlanta city schools. One is the inexorable effect of Campbell’s Law of corrupting influence, given the district’s use of test scores to make “consequential decisions,” as Professor Campbell called them. (The other I will deal with below.)

Of corruption two kinds have been found. The obvious one is evidence that many schools in Atlanta altered their students’ answer sheets, sometimes in ways that would be ludicrous if they were not criminal. Stephen Jay Gould once said, “If the data seem to good to be true, it’s because they probably are,” but we wouldn’t have had to take Gould at Harvard to be suspicious when a class goes from a 24% proficiency rate to 86% in one year. Also, these same data enabled Atlanta’s superintendent “to collect $600,000 in performance bonuses over 10 years to supplement her $400,000 annual salary,” which suggests another kind of corruption. An investigation reported that one middle school took reprisals against teachers who did not participate in “changing parties” where wrong answers were erased and right answers replaced them.

But another strand in the administration of the Atlanta schools needs mention too. I am not quite sure what to call it, but after describing a couple of circumstances of the superintendent’s leadership, I will try and supply a label. It entailed the elevation of Herself and, under her administration, the belittling of “noncompliant” teachers.

The superintendent would have annual gatherings at the Georgia Dome, with seating arranged by school according to the schools’ performance on standardized tests. The “worst” schools’ employees were not allowed to sit on the field but instead had to go to the stands. It is not reported that they had to wear dunce caps, but you get the idea. At one school the “worst” teachers were required by their principal to crawl on all fours under a table. The degradation! They might as well have had to wear signs around their necks saying, “I am a worm, and no man[1].”

By contrast, the “best” schools’ employees at the Georgia Dome had seating reserved for them near The Presence. I use the word advisedly because The Presence was highly insulated at the district offices, where visitors had to use two security cards and get past a receptionist to make a visit, or should I say have an audience? People allowed in The Presence (or near it at the Georgia Dome) might have felt like Louis XIV’s courtiers who had the petites and grandes entrées into the Monarch’s Presence at Versailles, or who were allowed to accompany him to his holiday chateau at Marly[2].

The mixture of such kinds of exaltation and abasement with corruption should be considered “a deed without a name,” but in the best tradition of Educationist Baloney I will call it Stratification Based Records Adjustment Administration.

Name aside, two things here are seriously rotten: one is corruption, and the other is warped professional relationships. Though arrests can, should, and will be made for cheating, I hope that the criminal investigation will be paralleled by an educational investigation into what sounds like a sick organization.

 

[Adèle] was a lively child, who had been spoilt and indulged, and therefore was sometimes wayward; but as she was committed entirely to my care, and no injudicious interference from any quarter ever thwarted my plans for her improvement, she soon forgot her little freaks, and became obedient and teachable.  She had no great talents, no marked traits of character, no peculiar development of feeling or taste which raised her one inch above the ordinary level of childhood; but neither had she any deficiency or vice which sunk her below it.  She made reasonable progress, entertained for me a vivacious, though perhaps not very profound, affection; and by her simplicity, gay prattle, and efforts to please, inspired me, in return, with a degree of attachment sufficient to make us both content in each other’s society.

This, par parenthèse, will be thought cool language by persons who entertain solemn doctrines about the angelic nature of children, and the duty of those charged with their education to conceive for them an idolatrous devotion: but I am not writing to flatter parental egotism, to echo cant, or prop up humbug; I am merely telling the truth.  I felt a conscientious solicitude for Adèle’s welfare and progress, and a quiet liking for her little self…

Jane Eyre, Chapter XII

 

Today’s guest writer was a first-rate novelist, and her words are instructive because she also happened to have been a teacher. The extract from Charlotte Brontë goes back to the 1840s, long before even Teachers College was founded, but it is worth a second look for what it says about perennial conditions of teaching and learning and about discourse on education.

Brontë spent a number of years as a schoolteacher and a governess, the experience of which gave her an understanding and clarity of thought that she shows in what she says about her pupil and “herself,” if we may call Jane that; for Jane, like Brontë, was earnest, grave, and reserved. Let us take a look at her observations and conclusions.

We see first of all that Adèle had to accept Jane’s authority and give up her waywardness and “little freaks.” Given Brontë’s own (brief) experience in an abusive school, we may be sure that Jane would not have wanted to impose an abusive regime on Adèle, but merely to insist on a certain tractability or readiness to meet her governess’s reasonable expectations in order to become “obedient and teachable.”

What expectation did Jane have of Adèle? Not that she “achieve proficiency” in her subjects; not that she engage in “mastery learning;” not that she become a Baby Einstein: no, Jane expected her to make “reasonable progress.” There was no question of saddling with unreasonable expectations a girl whom we in a modern mathematical metaphor would call “average,” a word Brontë would not have considered using. Nor, we feel, would Jane have let Adèle get by with work below her capacity.

Finally, Jane had an expectation of reciprocal regard and care: that Adèle would entertain a “vivacious, if not very profund, affection” for her; she, in turn, became attached enough that the two of them could be content in each other’s company. At a school where I taught, the governing emotion was said to be “unconditional love.” That seems too extravagant to be normative, but some kind of emotional tie must exist between teacher and pupil.

These seem like reasonable goals for an ordinary pupil, but they would have to maintain their integrity against five ways of thinking inimical to good teaching and learning, which Brontë names (I give them here in her order):

1.  Thinking that children have “angelic natures.” We may reject St. Augustine’s belief that children in their natural state deserve damnation[1] and yet still have some reservation about how naturally good they are[2]. This reservation is a basis of our rationalizing and justifying punishment or correction, and it helps any good teacher keep a weather eye out for trouble.

2.  Conceiving an “idolatrous devotion” to one’s children or pupils. We have in this kind of mistake the starting-point of much mischief, including what some educational psychologists call the “permissive-indulgent” style of child-rearing or teaching.

3.  Flattering parental egotism. Given the difficulty of letting down a parent who thinks Junior walks on water, leaps tall buildings, and understands string theory, the alternative has a certain attractive but dangerous appeal. Three dangers lurk in it: The parent is abetted in forming unrealistic expectations of Junior, which he or she then sometimes expects the teacher to abet with or without justification; the school is suborned in various kinds of academic fakery; and the teacher is accustomed to misrepresentation of Junior’s accomplishments. All teachers, but not all parents, recognize the first danger. Of the second we may instance cases of schools’ offering “accelerated courses” to students who can’t handle them because parents demand them. Of course the jig is up when, say, the AP test scores come back and 40% of the students taking the test get a 1 or 2. But forces other than just parental egotism lead to such impostures, so we should not just blame parents—or our attitude towards parents—for them. But teachers (and their administrators!) should find ways to keep these dangers from becoming real by giving honest assessments tempered by humanity.

4. Echoing cant[3]. This old-fashioned but excellent word refers to a kind of baloney all too common in the Ed Biz when The Biz is not echoing nonsense. A good example would be the way that Jerome Bruner’s thinking was (over)simplified or misrepresented to justify “mastery learning” and to make doing so an onus on the teachers, some of whom did not have the nimbleness of conception necessary to adapt singlehandedly a structure of learning to every pupil’s developmental needs. The basis for this onus was the cant expression that any subject can be made teachable to any pupil at any stage of development, a manifestly false position.

5. Propping up humbug. It’s too bad that the only person to use this word besides Jane is Scrooge, for humbug is forever, though its details may change from time to time. But humbug becomes dangerous when it is made into law. What else are No Child Left Behind’s demands for “proficiency” and penalties for poor performance on “value-added learning” tests than a gigantic prop to humbug? What else are the instances of Campbell’s Law in corrupt school districts that we have read about in the last two years?

To these five ways of thinking Brontë offers five antidotes: reciprocity, attachment, expectation of reasonable progress, telling the truth, and conscientious solicitude for students. To me it is no contest.

 

[1] St. Augustine could be severe. To a questioner who asked him what God was doing before he created the heavens and the earth, he answered, “He was creating hell for people who ask foolish questions”

[2] Thus my colleague the geography teacher had a small lidded earthenware pot near his classroom door labeled “ASHES OF TROUBLESOME STUDENTS.”

[3] the expression or repetition of conventional, trite, or unconsidered ideas, opinions, or sentiments; especially : the insincere use of pious phraseology. “cant.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster, 2002. http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com (16 Jul. 2011).

Sometimes a report from the schoolhouse needs a careful second look with questions to follow. When the report is appalling, that need is urgent. Such is an article on “restraining” students just published in The New York Times, with its report on the pepper-spraying of a first-grader and his being “involuntary committed” to a hospital by police in San Mateo, California.

The first-grader was said to have an “anxiety disorder.” I would like to know under what conditions six-year-olds with diagnosed psychiatric disorders are admitted to public schools and how their teachers are taught and helped to take care of the troubled kids they teach. I would particularly like to know how this training and help are surviving California’s axe-murder of public education.

The report said that the student “wandered away from campus.” Did he open doors or climb fences to “wander away”? Was a student with a psychiatric disorder allowed to play unsupervised in an unfenced playground, and did he “wander away” from it? Or did he “wander away” from a supervised playground? The Times said that he was “restrained” by “teachers” who returned him to school. Why did more than one teacher go out to fetch the wayward boy? Where were they when he “wandered away”? How far did he wander before he was noticed missing? Did he leave the sight of the school? The opening of the article has a series of drawings of a man being wrestled to the ground by another man, labeling it a “restraint technique.” Why did the reporter say that the teachers “restrained” the boy when they found him instead of saying that “they took him by the wrists [or however they did it] and led him back”? Did they treat him like the restrained person in the pictures?

After they “returned him to school,” he then “climbed on top of a cabinet and refused to get down.” Was this cabinet in the school’s office or in a classroom? If a classroom, why wasn’t he taken to the office? Did the same teachers who “restrained” him and returned him to school find themselves unable or unwilling to stop a six-year-old boy from climbing a cabinet or to remove him from the top once he got there? Was the top of a cabinet within his climbing distance out of the reach of the adults in the room? Did he menace them with his bared teeth or endanger them by kicks towards the face from steel-toed boots?

The teachers “called the police.” Where were the administrators? Where were they when “teachers” were out looking for the wayward child? Why didn’t they call the police, assuming that calling the police onto a school campus is an administrative decision?

When the police came, did they try to remove him from the top of the cabinet before pepper-spraying him? Were they unable to reach him? Do the police need guidelines for the use of pepper spray on six-year-olds? By saying that the police “involuntarily committed” the boy to a hospital, what does the reporter mean? Why did the police think the boy needed hospitalization? Why was he not taken there in an ambulance but “committed” there by police? Why did the hospital admit him without the parents’ approval?

The article ran this item as part of a discussion of the political difficulty of regulating “restraint techniques” used at schools. Far more urgent to me seems the need to discuss how such an incident as this one could proceed as far as it did. The politics of education are dismal these days, but something else here is more radically awry.

 

Harold Bloom reports that when he first read Blake as a boy, he was attracted even though he couldn’t understand. Kenneth Koch says[1], “Once you can enjoy [poems], understanding is on the way, for pleasure, in reading a poem, is the first sign of it.”  The common thread is that poems’ attractive pleasures beckon us more immediately than (the promise of) understanding. Koch goes on to say that “different poems offer different immediate satisfactions,” and then contrasts Yeats’s “The Choice” and Stevens’s “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” as examples.

Bloom and Koch are on to something that teachers ought to remember in their teaching, but before discussing in particular what it is, we should examine Koch further. He says, about Williams but truly of all poets, “The secret is to keep reading and to take whatever a poem gives first as what it gives first, and stick with that, and see if there is more[2].” The advice that follows then stands to reason: “Certainly you don’t have to be embarrassed by not understanding a poem right away. If teachers have taught you to be, they have done a disservice, and in fact many people, because of such teachers, have been scared away from poetry. The cure is simply to forget the bad instruction and to read some poems.”

It may be simple, but it is difficult, to forget bad instruction in poetry. It is just as difficult and rather more complicated to give up bad teaching of poems. First one has to recognize that one is doing it. What are some signs?

1. The students sometimes explain by prefacing an explanation with “the poet is trying to say….” I forbid my students to use this formula, telling them that what the poet was trying to say is what he or she actually said. If they get used to this way of “explaining,” they get used to the idea embedded in it: that their, or their teacher’s, comparatively dull, second-rate, prosaic equivalent is somehow intellectually truer and therefore better than the poet’s own words. If that is true, why did the poem, but not the explanation, take the top of my head off?

2.  The students buy into the “Hidden Meaning assumption[3], which directs one to more or less ignore the surface of the poem for some elusive and momentous significance that the poet has buried amid the words and music.” That some poets write acrostics and that Bach used the letters of his name as the notes of a fugal subject, which are hidden from ordinary sensory apprehension, are exceptions that prove the rule: poets and other artists want to show, not hide, their work. More to the point is Koch’s dictum that poems ”say what they say and suggest what they suggest.”

3.  They tend to think it better to read an “interpitation” (O’Connor’s word) than to come up with their own insights into a poem’s meaning. There may be three reasons besides laziness for this shutdown of brainpower. The first is that they have not been taught how to read closely, how to parse, how to scan, and how to justify an explanation, especially an explanation of something ambiguous; and they therefore accept someone else’s. Second, they naïvely accept the Hidden Meaning flourished before them in the “interpitation” like a rabbit from a hat—accept the trickery as genuine magic and the illusion as equivalent to insight. Third, their thinking has been debauched by deconstructionism[4] or reader-response theory to the point where they think that any explanation will do because any explanation is as “valid” as any other.

4.  They are confused by the contradictory teaching sometimes found in school, that poetry “has” all sorts of “elements” like lines, rhyme/rime[5], rhythm, tropes, and imagery requiring disciplined or focused background to marshal and write and that it is a “creative” holiday from the discipline of prose. How can it be both? The answer sometimes given—that poetry can be anything it wants to be—is empty and explains nothing.

Then what will good instruction do? A friend of mine who used to be the editor of a poetry magazine tells me that his favorite teacher in college was talking about Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” a portion of which serves as the title of this posting. He invited the students to look out the window at the saturated clayey soil and observed that plowing it on a sunny day would pressurize it, causing the water to extrude slightly and flash in the sunlight suddenly and briefly as the plow passed, the flash-point moving with the plow. A miraculous comment, though of course it was helped by there being saturated clayey soil outside the classroom window. Suddenly this strange line is possible before the students, real and as palpable as they care to make it.

Sillion? Try looking it up in a dictionary and see how far you get. The excellent website to which I just linked you gives one definition, but the Oxford Authors Gerard Manley Hopkins gives another: “a strip of arable land usually worked by a tenant farmer.” And those who know Hopkins know that he invents words and uses obscure words from dialectal English. Did he want one because it rhymed with “billion”? I think not. This British website on farming has a page called “What is sillion? A farmer’s explanation of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ most famous poem.” I winced when I saw it say that the poem is “about birdwatching,” which of course it is, in a way[6], but I got past that very quickly: it confirmed the view of the poetry website, and it makes sense. The imagery of plowed soil flashing at the plow’s cut is almost exactly parallel to the following image of coals’ glowing insides being suddenly revealed by a fall, a gall, and a gash. I hold with the farmer and the poets’ web site and think I can explain why.

That is what I would like my students to be able to do when they set out to “explain” a poem. If “The Windhover” demands too much of their exploratory skill, others are available. It is better to find those others first and let them gain confidence with them than to plop a poem down in front of them and then supply them with an explanation by magic. And thus we have another way to look at “shéer plód” than as unalloyed labor: when something is sheer, it is transparent and contains nothing Hidden. How much better this effort would then be at making their own understanding shine.