Category Where Is My Mind

The Most Important Lesson

Dusty Leave a comment

So this is how I started my English 10 classes this year. I first had my students write an essay about what they want, and what they need. Then I showed them this, and asked them first to discuss what I had to say here about wants and needs, and I asked them to write a second draft of their essay. Then we read a short story — “The Bet” by Anton Chekhov — and talked about how that story said something about wants and needs, because the goal of the class, in part, is to get them to think about what literature has to say about life and about the human condition, and how it relates to them personally and directly. Then I asked them to add another piece to their essay about that short story, which I also did with mine.

So here is my essay, on the most important lesson anyone can learn.

***

When I was learning how to be a teacher, we had a presentation from a guy who had been a teacher for a long time. He came in talking fast and loud, brimming with confidence: his opener was something like “What I’m about to show you is the most important lesson you’re ever going to see!” He was saying that on two levels: he was talking both to us, a group of university students on the way to becoming teachers, and to the students we would eventually have, because this was how he started the lesson he was presenting to us, which was the way he started his own classes as a teacher, and he was telling us what he thought we should say to our future students. He was saying this was the most important lesson we were going to learn, that would make all the difference for us as future teachers, and telling us that we needed to take advantage of it: and he was telling us how to pitch his lesson to our students, the way he pitched it to his, as the most important thing they would ever learn. And then his lesson was on the difference between wants and needs.

Here’s how it went. He would start his class by asking his students what they needed. Right then, in school or out, whatever: he wanted them to say what they needed. He would call on some, get some volunteers, and make a list of things on the board that they said they needed. “A job” was one. “A car” was another. “A girlfriend” was the one he put down as a joke, but I don’t doubt that he got that response many times over his years of teaching this lesson this way. “Sleep” might be another example, or “McDonald’s.” 

Once he got this list, he would then ask: Okay, what happens if you don’t get this? He would pick out the students who gave the different answers, and ask them: what will happen if you don’t get a job? If you don’t get a car? If you don’t get a girlfriend? The students would joke about it, maybe – “It would suck!” “I’d have to rob banks for money!” – and then get down to the answer, the truth: nothing would happen, really. If that student didn’t get the car, they would just continue getting rides from other people, or riding the bus or walking, or however they got around. They would be able to continue on just as they had been up until that point, because of course they did not have a car (Imagine if someone who had something said that they needed it? How ridiculous! You don’t need things you already have!), and they had been able to get to that point in their lives just fine.

“Okay,” the teacher would say. “Then you don’t need that. Right? You don’t need that job, that car, that girlfriend. You just want those things.”

Then he would go to one of the other examples given: like sleep. Or McDonald’s. And he would focus on those: what happens if you don’t get sleep? Is that the same as not getting a car, or a girlfriend? Or McDonald’s: okay, maybe you don’t actually need a Big Mac and fries – but if you don’t have any food at all… you would not be able to keep living.

That was different from not getting a car, or a girlfriend. Without food, without sleep, we cannot live.

“So those,” he would tell his students, “are needs. Things you can’t live without. Everything else is just a want.”

That lesson, that conversation, has stuck with me – obviously – for a long time: more than a quarter century. I’ve never actually used his lesson, because the want/need discussion went on to a different topic, which was his actual point: he would then talk about control. We all want control, he would say to his students, but we don’t need it. His point was that those students did not get to have a lot of control over their own lives – as you do not – and that they wanted it, as you probably do; and it was his belief that much of the misbehavior that students carried out in his class was an attempt to take control: teenager gets bored of doing what the teacher wants, which is really being tired of being controlled, so they yell out something disruptive or do something distracting, because they want to take control of the class. They don’t necessarily want to focus on the distracting thing they say or do: they just want to remove the teacher’s ability to control the class, and to control the time and attention of that particular student who was being disruptive. Who was trying to take control of themselves, and coincidentally, of the class. And he said that he would ask his students to allow him to have control over the class, so that the class could get through the work they needed to do: and that was why he talked about wants and needs, because while the student may want control, what they needed was to learn; and so while he as the teacher may not want control, he needed it if they were going to learn anything. He needed them to let him have control over them, to choose to let him take control. On days when they might be struggling with being controlled, he would take the disruptive students out into the hall and ask them if they could let him take control over them temporarily, and they generally would let him – or, if they just couldn’t stand to let him be in charge of them right then, he would accept that and just ask them to go to the principal’s office, where they would not be under his control, but they also wouldn’t be taking control of the class away from him. And when he gave them that choice, they usually were able to choose one or the other: accept his control over the class, or accept leaving the class for that day.

He said it was the best method he had ever heard of or seen for maintaining discipline in a class. He actually told us that we were not allowed to use his lesson if we ended up teaching in the same school where he taught, because he wanted to be the one to use it and he didn’t think it would work if two teachers used it with the same students. I remember being impressed by that. Because most of the people we learned from were not actually teachers, not in high schools or middle schools; they taught teachers, they didn’t teach teenagers. But this guy did teach teenagers, and this was a lesson that was actually important to him: not just an idea he had that he thought might work, maybe, which was my impression of most of the rest of the examples I was being given.

But I never taught that lesson to my classes. Because I hate the idea of taking control. I like the idea of being allowed to have control, of asking people to consent to my temporary control, because I recognize that I need to have some control to teach the class; but I hate the idea of taking it. I hate telling people what to do. Which is maybe something I shouldn’t be saying to you. Because what if you now think that you can take control away from me, and I won’t do anything to take it back?

See, the thing of it is, I may not want to take control. But if I need to, I can. And I will.

What I would rather do, though, is get you all to understand what you want, and what you need – and what I can do to help you get what you want, and what you need. So let’s get back to that.

The reason that teacher started his lesson about control with a discussion of wants and needs was that he wanted his students to recognize that they did not need to take control of the class, because they already had control over the only part of the class that really mattered: themselves. The teacher was telling his students – and us, his potential future co-workers – that we had control over ourselves, all of us, because we have choice. His students could choose to let him take control over them, or they could choose to leave. If they chose to leave, and go to the principal’s office, there would be consequences, of course – just like if you all choose not to come to school at all, or if I chose to quit my job – but the truth is, there are consequences of every choice: choosing to come to school and sit in class and let the teacher be in charge means you are choosing to be bored, at least some of the time. Choosing to sit through things that you already know, or do not need to know, or do not want to know. Choosing to be uncomfortable, to not have the things you want, right now, like sleep, or McDonald’s.

I never taught the lesson that teacher showed me (Which was titled “EVERYONE IS TRYING TO CONTROL ME AND I CAN’T MAKE THEM STOP!”) because I do not want to take control. I don’t like the idea of telling my students that I need to take control over them. (His explanation of how he proved to the students how they chose to come to school was “Nobody is holding a gun to your head!” And I do not like that, do not like the idea of a want being anything that is not literally a risk to the continuation of your life, do not like the idea that the need I am providing for is, therefore, someone holding a gun to the heads of my students.) I do, however, like the idea of helping my students to see that they already have control, because they have choice: you have choice. You can choose to be here, or you can choose to not be here. Both choices have consequences, of course, but both are possible. There are, in fact, several ways you could achieve your goal, if your goal is to not be here; and all of those ways have consequences, and all of those ways have steps you would need to take to get to where you wanted to be (Not here). For instance, you would not be here if you went to a different school; and there are ways you could try to achieve that. You would not be here if you graduated early; and there are ways you could achieve that – even at your young age, though you would have to have already started on that path to have achieved it by this current moment. Still: you could have achieved that. You could achieve not being here by ditching class, and maybe you could even avoid those consequences; but probably not for long. But hey, maybe your consequences for ditching would be a suspension – and then you wouldn’t be here!

Or, you can choose to be here. Which then leads to several more choices: you can choose to pay attention, or not; you can choose to participate actively, or not; you can choose to disrupt the class, or not. All of those choices have consequences, some good and some bad – though all I mean by that is that some are consequences that you may want and some are consequences that you would not want. (Choices also have moral consequences that make them good or bad, but that’s WAY too big a topic to get into in this conversation.) – but all of them are choices you can make. Because you have control over yourself. Unless you give me control, unless you choose to give me control, I don’t have control over you. Which is good, because I don’t want it. 

Why don’t I want control? Especially when so many other teachers do? Let me put it this way. There’s a part in a story I teach in one of my classes (“The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin) where the main character realizes that she is now free, that no one will be able to control her any longer; and she thinks “There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.” That last part, when I read it and thought about it, hit me hard: controlling someone else – imposing my private will on them – is a crime, whether it is done with a kind intention or a cruel intention. That’s why I don’t want to take control of you: because I don’t want to commit a crime.

Please notice, though, that when I do take control as a teacher, it is not me imposing my private will on you: it is done because it is my job to be in control of this class, and it is justified by the fact that you personally are not the only person here. There is a public need which overrides private will. But this is beside the point. The point is that I do not want to impose my private will on you. Ever. I want you to choose to work with me.

So that’s why I wanted to write about this, and to share it with you. That’s why I wanted you to write about what you want and what you need, and why I want you now to think about it more – and talk about it more, if you want to do that. Because while that other teacher focused his lesson on control, I want to focus on wants and needs; I think those are much more interesting, and important, to talk about, and think about, and then write about. (If you want to talk about why wants and needs are more interesting than control, we can talk about that.)

I think his distinction, the difference that he described, between wants and needs – that needs are things you can’t live without, and wants are everything else, which you can choose to have or not – is much too simple. I mean, you could get everything you need, and you would survive, but if you never got anything you wanted – would you want to keep living that way? And even in terms of getting what you need to live: how much of it do you need? Are there things we need more than other things we need? We need food and water and shelter, because without them we cannot live; but we also need sleep. But we can live without sleep: just not in any way we would want to live. The same with social interaction, with relationships with other people: we CAN live without any of that at all; but not any kind of full, healthy, satisfying life. And then, for me personally, I don’t just eat because I need to live, I eat because I want to. I love food. (Not McDonald’s, though.) So much, in fact, that I eat more food than I should, and that will at some point lead to me having medical problems that might make it harder for me to live; so, too much of what I need, as much as I want, becomes something I can’t have. 

His claim that, if you didn’t get what you wanted, then nothing would happen, nothing would change, is not true. There are consequences to both getting and not getting anything, wants or needs. And the idea that someone who had a car would not say they needed a car, because you don’t need something you already have, is clearly not true: we say that we need food even when we have food: because the need is ongoing. When we eat the food we have, we will need more food. Having it doesn’t mean we don’t need it any more. In some cases, having something might even mean we need it more, because we get used to having something – like a car, or a girlfriend – and we would suffer without it. Once we have it, and get used to it, we need it more than we did before we ever had it: so even a want can become a need, maybe. 

It’s complicated. But I also think it’s incredibly important. And also pretty interesting.

There’s a story about this, which I think comes at it in an interesting manner: Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet.” The story is about two men, in 1870, who make a bet about – well, actually, it’s not clear what it’s really about, or what their motivations are; it seems fairly clear that the bet is really just an example of how foolish these two men are, in different ways and for different reasons. The bet arises during a dinner party conversation about the death penalty: the participants discuss whether capital punishment is more or less moral than life imprisonment. Uninterested in actually considering what the meaning of “justice” might be, or the purpose of the criminal justice system in our society, a banker gets irritated at a lawyer who claims that life imprisonment is not so bad, and he bets the lawyer two million (he never mentions the units, but maybe “pounds” makes sense – which translates to something like $400 million in modern money) that the lawyer can’t stay voluntarily imprisoned for five years. The lawyer, apparently so incredibly arrogant in his opinions that he cares about nothing more than proving he’s better, ups that time to fifteen years, and the two agree. The lawyer then goes into confinement in a wing of the banker’s house for fifteen years. He actually goes through with it: he spends the next fifteen years trapped in a single room, without talking to a single person, without seeing the sun once. In that time he is given as many books as he wants, and he reads extensively – of course, having not much else to do – and then by the end of his confinement, he has changed. The banker has changed as well: since he is careless with his wealth (As is pretty obvious when a man is willing to bet 2 million pounds for – what? For winning an argument? He says later that this bet doesn’t prove either side, not that capital punishment is better nor that life imprisonment is better. Is it for the thrill of winning? Why didn’t he insist that the lawyer put up stakes? The banker stands to profit exactly nothing from this bet even if he wins it. That’s not a good money manager. So actually, I guess he has not changed.) he has lost much of it, and if he now has to pay out the 2 million pounds, he will be ruined. So, as one does, he decides to sneak into the locked room the night before he loses the bet, and kill the lawyer. However, he finds a letter beside the sleeping lawyer; he reads it and finds out that the lawyer has decided that nothing in this life matters, that he doesn’t want anything, not freedom, not money, not life; and so he will intentionally lose the bet to show that he doesn’t need the money. Saved from destitution, the banker leaves; then the lawyer leaves, losing the bet – and then the banker conceals the lawyer’s letter.

The interesting element of the story, for me, is the choices these two characters make, and the motivations behind them. Why does this bet happen? What are the characters after? In other words: what do they want? It’s definitely not a need – no one needs to bet anything, really. The original bet happens because both men are bluffing: they each want the other to give up. They both go through with the bet because they want to prove that they are men of their word: even when their word is foolish. It makes me realize that I want to be a man of my word, as well; though I think I need to not make foolish promises like “I will stay in one room for fifteen years just to prove that I can.” By the end of the story, the lawyer, after years spent alone reading and studying everything from natural science to philosophy to religion, comes to the personal revelation that Heaven’s value far outweighs everything on Earth, and therefore he does not want the money for the bet – but he also does not care if he has his freedom, or even his life. He stays in the prison voluntarily (as he has all along) to show that he doesn’t need freedom or health or anything on this Earth; he leaves just minutes before he would win the bet to show that he doesn’t need the money, either. I’ll agree with him that money is not something we need, not something of great value: but I could not disagree more that life on this Earth is without any value whatsoever. I need my life, on this Earth, and I need it to have value and purpose, while I am alive. Whether there is a heaven or not at the end of this life is irrelevant to this life, because we do not know anything other than this life exists: therefore this life is, for now, everything.

But in the story, both men’s choices are interesting to me. Among other impressions I get from this, I think it shows that more of our needs are really only wants than we actually think; when the lawyer deprives himself of things we see as critical to our lives, primarily human company, he realizes that he does not actually need those things at all. But I think the story also shows that we do need an audience for the important things we have to say – more often than we probably realize – and that sometimes we need to keep other people from having an audience, which is why the banker hides the lawyer’s letter at the end of the story. The narration claims it was to “avoid unnecessary rumors,” but it does not identify what rumors the letter will start; I have to wonder if it is the “rumor” that maybe two millions – or even $400 million – is not anything of great importance, if you choose to think of it that way. The banker’s decision to murder for that same amount shows that, for some people, that money is certainly important.

I would say that the actually important thing here is choice. 

So now you have a choice, which I am giving you because I don’t want to take control and tell you what to do. (Though I am limiting your choices within the boundaries of what I can control, and I am requiring you to make this choice; so in some ways I remain in control. Though you still, of course, have the choice to pay attention or not, to participate or not. As you always do. With consequences no matter what you choose.) We can talk, as a whole class or in small groups you will choose, about the difference between wants and needs, what it means to want something and what it means to need something; or you can each think about it on your own. In either case you will write about it, expanding on what you wrote before, because I want you to learn that writing about something is an excellent way to help you understand it, as long as you actually think about what you are writing about, especially after you already thought about it and wrote about it a little, and then read something about it and think about it some more.

No matter what you choose, you will eventually need to figure some of this out. You need to know what you need, and what you want, in your life. You need to figure out how you want to get what you need and what you want in your life. Not right now, not all at once – but eventually, you need to know.

Or else you won’t get it.  

And that’s the most important lesson you will ever learn.

***

Unfortunately, my students did not seem to learn this lesson. Their first essays about what they want and need were (mostly) incoherent, because they (mostly) do not think about what they write: they write to complete a task, to get finished and turn something in so they can get a grade. Their second essays were the same: because they (mostly) don’t re-think what they have already done; the task was accomplished without thought, what good would it do to think about it afterwards? Their third attempts, after we read “The Bet,” were confused in two ways: first because they didn’t really understand the story, they just thought it was weird and really dumb that the lawyer would choose fifteen years when he could have gotten the money for five, and they were pretty sure they would have done five years for millions of dollars, because money is (clearly) the most important thing in life; and then they were confused about how to include those weird ideas in their essays, which were about different things, things they want and need, not what some old guy in 1870 wanted and needed.

I’m exaggerating a bit (and leaving out the examples that were from students who really did think about this stuff, and really did have some insights and some interesting thoughts), but basically, my students did not see the need to think very much about any of this. They just wanted to get the task done. And when they found out that they would get a 100% for completing the essay, no matter what they wrote or how, they decided not to think, because it was easier to just do nothing. And while they accept that they need to do schoolwork and get good grades, so they can graduate and get good jobs, so they can make money (because money is the most important thing in the world), they don’t want to do anything other than fun stuff like talk to their friends and play video games. Which, okay, valid.

And I don’t want to control them.

I think I need to find a new career.

I Did It My Why

Dusty 1 Comment
when admin says remember your why - Tony Stark Eye Roll Meme Generator

It’s inservice season!

Of course that should be the time of year, as the old joke goes, when we all get to hunt inservices, but it just means that this is the time of year when teachers go back to work in order to pre-game before the students arrive. (Yes, if you’re wondering, we’ll be drinking – but not enough. Never enough.)

If you are wondering – or, if you are one of my fellow teachers, which means your mouth is hanging open and you are cussing foully at the very thought of this – yes, this is absurdly early. In fact I am writing this at the end of the first half-week of inservice: this year I went back to school on July 16th. I kept seeing memes from teacher meme accounts that joked about our general outrage over Back to School sales happening now, with some kind of How-dare-you caption or comment that included the phrase, “It is JULY!” And though I share that outrage, every time I saw it I had to just sigh. Because not only am I back to work in the middle of July, but I will actually have students in July: classes this year start on Tuesday, July 29th. Thereby spelling the doom of that last vestige of the past advantages of being a teacher: it used to be a steady job, that was respected and appreciated, and which offered good benefits and a lovely, long summer vacation; now none of that is true, at least outside of the wealthier blue states.

But at least we’re still badly paid. So that tradition goes on.

Whenever I think about inservice – which I try not to do whenever I am not in the middle of it, but when I am in the middle of it, I always find myself stuck in uncomfortable chairs in rooms full of people who will look askance at me if they do not actually accuse me of disrespectful misbehavior should I have the audacity to distract myself from the pointless and condescending lecture being presented as helpful instruction, and so I end up spending quite a bit of inservice time pondering in silence the meaning of various available abstractions like this one – I wonder: What is inservice? (Also Why am I here? And Is there value in suffering?) It’s a strange word, after all: is it intended to differentiate this process from some other system called outservice? Which, frankly, if the only difference between inservice and outservice is that outservice is carried out in some place other than the school building, I’ll still take that one every time. And whether the service is in or it is out: who is being serviced? Am I and my fellow teachers the recipients of said service, like cars out of tune? Or are we the ones servicing something or someone else? If it is the teachers performing the service, what (who?) are we servicing, and why?

The ostensible answer is that inservice is meant to provide teachers with time and training to help us prepare for the upcoming school year; so essentially, it is the first one: we teachers are rolling into the garage like smoke-belching, backfiring, broken-down jalopies (Not entirely inaccurate), and the mechanics tune us up to get us ready for the race about to begin. I’m not sure what that makes the students, who are not the drivers and not quite passengers – maybe the cargo? Maybe the road we are driving on? – but I think that’s taking the metaphor too far. This lens does bring into clarity a number of obnoxious things that happen during inservice, not the least of which is: remembering my why.

There are themes that run throughout inservice everywhere, always, and which return every year, like a repeating motif in a Beethoven symphony, or like a recurring nightmare; one of these is the certainty that someone, almost certainly someone who does not teach, will ask the teachers to remember their why.

Why do we teach? Why do we take on this difficult and underappreciated job? Why do we come back to it year after year? Is it like returning to an abusive relationship? Is it like trauma that hides behind a memory block, as is supposed to happen with women who go through natural childbirth and then have to forget how incredibly painful the experience is or they would never have any more children?

As I have never given birth, nor been in an abusive relationship other than working in education, I cannot say. I will say that I remember, every year, how awful the previous year was – and also how wonderful it was, at times.

Which brings me to this year, and the current inservice season, and the direction – which was indeed delivered last week, by a presenter who is not a teacher – to remember my why.

Last year was bad. It wasn’t my worst year – that will always be 2011-2012, when I was working through a recession and a state investigation and a union contract negotiation in which I was the lead negotiator (And it says something that 2012 was the year I won Teacher of the Year for my school district in St. Helens, Oregon) – but it was bad. I spent a fair amount of time last year thinking about, and looking for, jobs that were not teaching jobs. That’s how bad it was: it changed my why into a What the hell am I doing here?, a question that is much less conducive to being a good teacher, and so not one that will be recognized at most inservice training sessions, even though surely many teachers at those sessions are asking that question, repeatedly, sometimes out loud, though under our breaths, so we don’t get dirty looks.

But here I am, one more time – my 26th – starting a new school year, about to teach high school English to a new (Well, partly new; partly familiar, which is at least part of the problem) cohort of students. And I found myself this past week thinking, genuinely wondering, Why?

Why am I teaching? Still? Why am I doing this to myself?

I don’t have an answer, not an immediate one. On some level, I don’t want to be here any more, don’t want to be teaching, don’t want to be teaching at the school where I have been teaching for the last 11 years. But that, too, is not the whole answer, and the whole answer is not immediately obvious in that context, either.

So let’s talk about it.

Why am I here? Why am I teaching?

First of all, most clearly and fundamentally, I’m here because I need a job. If I lived in a different kind of society – one that I think would be better in countless ways – that did not define a person’s value by their economic activity, then I would not be a teacher, at least not a classroom teacher. I have often thought I would like to teach the way Socrates did: at dinner parties, in conversations with interested parties, or out on the streets with random passersby; obviously I couldn’t do that for money, but I think I’d be pretty good at it. But I don’t live in that society, I live in this individualistic capitalist one, and so I must work for money so I can have a house and food and air conditioning, all the vital necessities of life. It’s possible I could survive without a job, but my level of misery would go up exponentially, even over what I went through, what I go through, as a teacher. So I work, rather than become homeless and starve on the street.

But does it need to be this job? At the moment, that answer is close to a definite yes, because my wife, who was also a teacher last year, and who had a far worse year than I did, lost her job to budget cuts at the end of last year; as she is working to build her entrepreneurial endeavors, it falls to me to provide a steady income and health insurance; because teachers are generally more valuable as we gain experience, our pay goes up every year and then drops precipitously if we change schools or school districts – I have done this twice, the first time losing about 20% of my annual pay and the second time 40% — so that means I need to stay in this job, rather than get another teaching position. That wasn’t an easy or a simple decision: I applied for, and could have gotten, a job teaching in a different school that would have earned me about 30% less than I make now; but I just couldn’t afford the drop in pay. So here I am. (It does help that I have many dear friends at this school, and that some of my students are lovely people. But it only helps, it doesn’t make the decision easy. It’s not the why.)

It is possible I could change jobs entirely, even change industries; but because most jobs pay more with experience, like teaching does, I would have to start at the bottom of the scale, and that is generally also less than I make as a teacher, even if the upper end of pay would be more. I am also painfully aware that the current political power structure puts continuing health insurance across changes in employers at serious risk of ending, which makes me doubly unwilling to leave my current job for a new one. Any job that would pay as much as or more than I make teaching would require additional training and/or certification, which makes them possibilities for the future, but not for now. (Also, I am 51, so starting a whole new career at the bottom and working my way up is both less attractive and also less likely than it would have been 20 years ago. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.)

But of course, I could do those things. I could get a job in marketing, or in public relations, or in corporate training. (I could become one of the people who provide inservice to teachers, but I would really have to hate myself to do that.) Especially if I and my family moved states, to one that had a generally higher payscale for professional jobs, I could find something that provided the same approximate income. Yet here I am, back teaching again. So there’s more reason for my returning to teaching than just necessity, more than just money. I will also point out that, if I just wanted to receive my paycheck and cared about nothing else, it would be fairly easy for me to keep my job despite becoming a terrible teacher, because it is in fact quite hard to fire bad teachers. So long as I didn’t hit or harass one of my students, I could treat my job very differently from how I treat it now, how I have always treated it, so that even though it was the same job, it would be a very different experience.

Let me be a little specific. I teach English to high school students, and I do it well. I make literature both understandable and interesting to my students – or at least I create an opportunity for them to find literature both understandable and interesting. I make the class as valuable and entertaining an experience as I can, as much of the time as I can – and that’s a good amount of the time (though of course the experience of my class is subjective and I don’t doubt that some students think I do a terrible job of teaching, and/or that my class is boring as hell. But mostly, they don’t think that, not if they pay attention and try.). I work very hard to achieve that: I spend hours and hours thinking about what I am going to teach and how, hours and hours preparing materials and assignments and activities, and then when it is time to go and teach those things, I show up, every day, as ready as I can be to teach the material to the students I have. I ignore the inconveniences and frustrations of my daily work, of my classes and my situation, and do my best to treat every class period as an opportunity for both progress and also fun. I try to learn as much as I can about my individual students, both so that I can teach them better and so I can show them the respect they are due as human beings who are as wonderful and valuable as every other human being, despite being adolescents (That’s not a dig, not really; adolescence is miserable, and all of us react to that misery by inflicting misery on others. I did it too. I don’t blame them for it: but it can be very hard to deal with them while they work their way through it.). I try to be as honest and vulnerable and trusting with them with my own genuine self as I can be, again so that I can teach them better and so I can show them the respect of being real with them, so they can trust me, so they can work with me.

The fact that I do that, that I have done that every year, is part of the reason why I had a bad year last year, and part of why I don’t want to do this any more: because my students last year did not generally return my respect and my openness. They did not listen or value my honesty and vulnerability, and they did not show me the respect I deserve as a fellow human being, let alone as a teacher who has some ability to affect their lives, possibly for the better. They mostly didn’t disrespect me maliciously, just being teenagers in this modern world; but it was hard to remember that and to keep caring about them and keep trying to be the kind of teacher I want to be with them while they treated me with callous indifference. There were many times, for instance, when I would ask my students about something, and they would ask me what I thought or what my experience was in regards to that idea or situation, and while I was answering the question they asked me, they would not listen: they would turn away and have side conversations, or look at their phones or Chromebooks, or leave the room, because they were bored. Not because they hated me and wanted to insult me, but just because they didn’t care, and they didn’t feel like they needed to show me the respect of their attention, even as I answered the question or gave the explanation they asked for. So as I said, not malicious, but nonetheless hurtful, and hard to deal with. And this year, I will have many of those same students back again. Will they treat me more respectfully? Will they listen to me when I talk, either as their teacher or as a fellow human being?

Probably not. But I am willing to try.

I don’t have to: I could assign them readings, and questions, and maybe videos or audio files of literature – particularly non-fiction, which is what my administrators want me to focus on anyway, as it is the heart of the testing that produces the data that is the obsession of all administrators everywhere –  and I could sit at my desk and monitor their online activity to ensure they were on task. To my school, that would be considered teaching, to a degree sufficient for me to keep my job and my current pay, which is not really related to my success or failure in actually teaching my students. If I produced data that was better than what I currently engender with my involved, honest, human, active, interactive teaching, then I would be even more secure in my job. I might even get a little bonus money if their test scores went up. And it would be so easy. Especially if I just had AI design my “lessons” for me. And grade their assignments.

I choose not to do that. I choose to take the much more difficult path, which does not necessarily make my job more secure, and which definitely does not produce the best test scores. And why do I choose that, you might ask?

That’s the Why worth thinking about.

I teach the way I do because I don’t just teach for money, and I don’t ever teach for test scores. I think that my teaching methods help students to get better at understanding literature and at explaining their understanding in writing, and so higher test scores should be the result of my methods; but those test scores are not my why. If anything I sometimes, perversely and against my own best interests, want those scores to go down while my students’ knowledge and abilities improve, for the data to become less reflective of my students’ actual learning and abilities. Because I want my students – and also my school and my community and my society – to care less about test scores and measurable progress data. Ideally they would not care about it at all, ever; and my hope is that when students grow and learn in my class, and know that they grow and learn in my class, and everyone around them knows that they grow and learn in my class, and then those test scores don’t improve, or even go down, then it shows the truth: that test scores do not measure what matters in education. Test scores and measurable progress data are the wrong focus for educators, because they put the focus on the wrong thing, especially in my subject: English as a subject of study is not about measurable progress in discrete skills. There is no “mastery” in English. It is about growing: growing as a person, as a thoughtful person, as a person who thinks about the world and our place in it, who is curious about the world, who is appreciative of the world, and who cares about the humans who live in it with them.

I want my students to be that. It will make them better people, with better lives, in a better world. I want to make that happen. So I am willing to work for it. Even though it’s hard. I’ve worked for it, worked hard, every day and every week and every month and every year, for coming up on three decades.

Last year, and to a lesser extent the few years before that, it didn’t work as well as I thought it should. My students did not grow as much as I wanted them to. Partly because they did not pay attention enough and did not try enough to actually improve in the subject, to actually work and learn in the class; because they did not pay me the respect I deserve as their teacher and as a fellow human being with some ability to improve their lives and the world they live in, who is working hard to do that, who shows up every day and who is as honest and vulnerable and genuine and compassionate as I can be with them, as often as I can be, and regardless of how they treat me and the work I do and the subject I love. Part of what made last year bad, I think, was that I was not able to keep being patient with my students when they disrespected me and my class: it made me lash out in frustration, or it made me shut down, which then confirmed for them that this was not a class and I was not a person they needed to listen to or be respectful of. We spiraled, because of that, both my students and myself, more than once; it took extra effort to drag us out of those spirals – and very little of that effort came from my students. If anything the majority of them encouraged that spiral, because they know that if I give up, and they give up, then they can stop trying, and they can just do nothing for as long as I have given up, as long as I stop trying and do nothing. For many of my students, for much of the time, their goal is to do absolutely nothing, to put forth no effort, to achieve no ambitions – to have no ambitions – and to not care about anything at all. Because of that they put all of the requirement for effort and motivation on me: often consciously and intentionally, again so that they can give up by making me give up.

But I did not give up, not in the long run (though I did, too often, in specific moments with specific classes), no matter how annoying some of my students were to work with, to be honest and vulnerable with, no matter how disrespectful they were in not listening, in not trying to think or empathize with me or to connect to the material. And the reasons why I didn’t give up are another part of my why, and more of what brought me back to teaching again this year.

The first one, the simpler one, is that I love English. I love literature, I love poetry and plays and novels and stories and essays and screeds and letters and songs and – all of it. I love reading and writing, and I love talking about those things, and learning about them, and teaching about them. All of it is fascinating and beautiful and magical to me, as well as incredibly important, both practically and esoterically, concretely and abstractly. It would wound me, deeply, if I were to treat my subject as something not worthy of real attention and focus and thought and energy, if I were to reduce it to excerpts and handouts and multiple choice questions and AI-generated content. It would dishonor this area of knowledge, this way of living in and interacting with the world, that has meant so much to me, that has consumed so much of my time and effort, that has brought me so much joy and also so much power. And I won’t do that, not even though my students do it every minute of every day, in every class, to one extent or another. Part of my why, part of my reason for teaching, is to fight back against that apathy and indifference and cynicism, that belief, endemic among my students and my society and growing worse every year, that reading is boring and pointless unless it is reading the captions on a TikTok or the comments on a YouTube video or a SubReddit, that writing is something best done with a prompt to ChatGPT. Preferably one entered with talk-to-text. I don’t think I can change that attitude in all of my students; certainly not in the ones who never even try to get better in my class, the ones who prefer to do nothing, at least in this context, and to be nothing as a consequence, at least in this context; but I can help change it for some of them, at least. And because I have read and taught and thought about Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 for so many years, I know that winning some people over to the side of the angels, to the side of the readers and the writers and the thinkers, the poets and the storytellers and the wordsmiths, is enough to save the soul of humanity and society – at least until we blow it up.

But then we will rebuild. If there are people who have not given up. The character Granger says it at the end of the book, after their world has, at least a little, blown up:

“There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ: every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we’ve done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we’ll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.”

That’s the other reason why I keep teaching, and again it is fairly abstract and idealistic, and again it is generally ineffective with the majority of my students: I want to make my society a better place. I want my students to understand the damn silly things we do, and that burn us up, so that they can help get us closer to that day when we stop jumping in the middle of our own goddamn funeral pyres. I want some of them to remember. To never give up.

I can’t fix all of it, of course, and so that makes it harder to keep coming back and trying again; just this year, I have had to sit through a conversation among teachers, who should all know better, about how AI is both inevitable and a valuable tool, and so we should not only accept it, but take part in it, contribute to its growth, tumor-like, on the collective mind of humanity; hearing that from my fellow teachers felt like being stabbed in the gut, and it makes me want to throw up my hands and cry out “A plague on both your houses!” I have for years chosen not to fight my students on their use of electronics, preferring to ask them to come along with me into the world of literature I make available and interesting and useful in my class; but I have watched as more and more and more of them have refused my kind invitation, my well-meaning passivity, and have failed to gain anything from me as a consequence. So now I will have to fight to make my classes available to my own students, and I don’t know how well that will work – and I don’t want to do it. I have no choice, so I will; but I don’t want to. That’s a why on both sides: I want to teach so I can fight for the souls of my students, and I want to let them do what they want, even if it destroys them.

But as I have learned from literature and from being a part of humanity and thinking about humanity, when some people are allowed to destroy themselves, they bring the rest of us down with them. I don’t want to allow that, not for a reason as stupid and worthless as laziness or fear of failure which creates failure, which are the main reasons why students don’t pay attention in class. Again, I don’t think I can save all of them – I don’t think I can save any of them, really, but I think I can help make a change in the paths for some of them, which will allow them to save themselves – but if I can save some, that will be enough. Not enough to make me happy, or to make my job easy; but enough to keep society moving mostly forward, and to allow humanity to continue to get better. If I can help them to empathize with others, as they might learn from To Kill a Mockingbird, or to think about the consequences of lies and self-serving fingerpointing, as they might start doing after reading The Crucible, or if I can just make them curious about the real value and power of reading, as they might learn from Fahrenheit 451, then I will accomplish that goal. I’ve done it before: and I hope to do it again. And again. Until I can’t do it any more.

That’s why.

The Truth

Dusty Leave a comment
Me (far right) as a janitor
Me as a high school English teacher. Which one looks happier?

I have been a high school teacher for a very long time. Too long, in some ways, because I have watched education change enough in that time to make me very nearly obsolete, and if you stay in a job until your job doesn’t exist any more, that’s too long. I fear that the day is coming when English teachers will not exist: and possibly the day when teachers will not exist.

I’m here today to try to forestall that day. Not for myself – if I reach a point where I cannot teach, I will move into janitorial work, and be quite happy; probably happier than I have been as a teacher. After 25 years of cleaning up student writing, I would rather clean up public restrooms. It’s less work.

But it’s also less important work. Not unimportant work, it’s incredibly important because janitors keep our world working, and keep it livable – but for me, as someone who works in education, that work is more important. I’m just saying custodial work is a good backup for me. I worked in maintenance for five years before I became a teacher, and I liked it. In some ways more than teaching.

So if I liked being a janitor more, you may be thinking, why am I a teacher? And why do I still like and sometimes love being a teacher, despite the issues in education that I deal with every day?

It’s because I love humanity. I think we are incredible. I believe we have infinite potential for goodness, and infinite capacity for wonder. What we have achieved as a race is miraculous – and also sometimes terrible – and despite our almost limitless ability to dream and imagine, we can’t imagine how many more miracles we can achieve. And, hopefully, how many terrors we can avoid, or even eliminate, in the future.

And the key to that, the key to unlocking our potential and achieving progress and positive growth, and to actually making miracles real, is education.

That’s why I’m a teacher. Because my faith, my zeal, my heartfelt belief, is this: the best thing about all of us is that we are human, and the most important thing one can do is help us all become better humans. That’s what I try to do as a teacher. And that’s why I’m here today, speaking to all of you about school. Because I want to help you all to learn something about which you have been deceived – or at least misled. I don’t think any of you really understand what school is or should be – and what you think it is, what you have been told the purpose of school is? That’s a lie.

The lie is that school is about money. All of you students have been told that the purpose of school, the reason you are here and the reason you should try hard and do all of your work, is because that way you can get into a good college, get a good job, and make good money. You’ve been told that all along – though in elementary school it may not have been stated explicitly; but back then you were certainly told, with absolute sincerity, that the purpose of your schooling was to prepare you for the next step, which would be harder, and would matter more: 2nd grade is meant to get you ready for the rigors of 3rd grade, 3rd grade gets you ready for 4th; all of elementary school is preparation for middle school, which is preparation for high school. And all the way along, more often the farther you get in your thirteen years of compulsory schooling, you have been told that the goal of high school is to get you ready to go to college. So that you can get a degree, so you can get a good job, so you can make good money. And since schools also tell you that the next stage is always more important than the current one – “When you get to high school, things get serious, that’s when grades really matter” – the clear implication is that the final goal is the one that really, really matters: college, degree, money. Did you absorb the message in 2nd grade that everything then was intended to prepare you for college and a job and good money? Maybe not, but the cumulative effect of all of this is the same: the goal of school is – money.

Teachers, and especially administrators, you have said this. You have said it to all of your students, probably with certainty, certainly with absolute sincerity. All of you have lied. All of you have misled all of your students. Don’t feel bad: it’s what you were taught, what you were told, what the whole apparatus and engine of the educational system forced on you. So you didn’t know, you couldn’t even think, that it might be a lie. This is some of the power of education: it can influence our beliefs, and therefore our behavior, in pernicious ways as well as positive ones. As always, the pernicious influence is easier. The idea that school is intended to help students make more money is a pernicious lie, and I need to convince you to stop saying it, to stop thinking it.

Don’t take this as a personal attack, either, teachers: I’ve said this too. With certainty. With absolute sincerity. Because it’s what I thought, and it’s what I was taught. But luckily for me, I had an extra advantage that most teachers don’t have, something that helped me realize the truth: I’m an artist. And I’m married to an artist.

My wife and I both went to college to study art. And though I ended up studying education – one of the more useless endeavors of my life – I earned my degree in art, specifically in literature. My wife, who is stronger and braver and smarter and better than I am, stayed with art all the way through. And she had one of the most difficult undergraduate programs I’ve ever heard of; harder than any pre-law or pre-med program, I would be willing to wager, and with far less prestige.

And here’s the thing, the magic secret: she didn’t do it for the money. Neither did I – though I did sell out and become a teacher. Actually, it’s not the becoming a teacher that was selling out; I still reflect and promote the ideas of my art in my teaching, and I am proud of the career I have had, because it is a noble vocation, when it is done right. But I should have kept studying art while I was in school. I hate to think of the potential I lost, the opportunities I walked away from by switching from literature to education. And it’s funny: just as my time in public school didn’t prepare me successfully for college, my college education didn’t prepare me successfully for my career in public school education. The time I spent studying art was far more useful to my teaching than my training in how to be a teacher.

It was in teacher training that I was first trained in the Big Lie, though of course I heard it in some form or other all the way through my own K-12 schooling: the idea that the purpose of school is to get students higher incomes than they would get without it. I was shown the statistics, the data, the graphs, that argue that college graduates make more money, on the average, than non-college graduates. I was shown this, and told to use it on my students, because it’s one of the most effective ways to get students to take school seriously, to work hard and therefore (incidentally) to learn. I assume that’s why all trained educators in this country have been shown the same data: because scaring children with threats about their future is effective. It’s cruel, essentially abusive, and it has some quite severe secondary and unintended consequences, as we are now discovering; but it’s effective. It makes those lazy little punks – that’s you, students – work harder and try more. At least some of them. At least some of the time.

Look: you can’t blame us. Teaching is hard. Everything about it is hard. Organizing curriculum is hard, planning lessons is hard, finding and adapting materials is hard. It’s hard to stand in front of a room and command attention, let alone respect. It’s hard to manage a room full of individual people and get them all to focus, together, on one thing. It’s hard to communicate clearly, and hard to understand children who haven’t yet learned to communicate clearly.

(Let me just say one thing to all the students here: speak up. I’m old; I’ve lost some of my hearing. I cannot understand you when you whisper, when you mumble. Whatever you have to say to me: speak up, please.

(And I’ll try to talk slower.)

And then, after completing all of those difficult tasks, teachers run into the biggest difficulty of all, the one that feels insurmountable: getting the students to do the work. We create this curriculum, design these lessons to deliver it, gather the materials, summon all of our strength, invent positive energy from somewhere, and teach our hearts out: and then all of you students, just – don’t do it. There are many individual reasons why you don’t do it, but in a large number of instances, maybe more common than any other, the reason you don’t do the work is just because you don’t want to. You don’t feel like it. You don’t see the point. You don’t think it matters. You don’t care.

Confronted with that, over and over in student after student, day after week after month after year, teachers have reacted understandably: we try to MAKE you care, dammit! Sometimes we do it angrily, resentfully, with hurt feelings; because we care. And when you care, it hurts to try so hard and have somebody just say, “Nah.” That’s why teachers then try to scare students, that’s why we threaten.

“Your boss won’t accept this kind of work when you have a job.”

“Your college professor won’t care about you, so they won’t make exceptions for you: they won’t even know your name.”

“You think you can act like that out in the real world? Think again!”

Hurt people lash out. We may tell ourselves we’re doing it to be helpful, but we’re doing it because we’re hurt. It makes it easier for us to tell the lie, because the lie is hurtful, where the truth is just difficult – and we’re lashing out at those who hurt us. We shouldn’t do that, but also, maybe all you students should stop hurting your teachers. When a student comes to my class and says something like “This is boring. Can we do something fun instead?” to my face, every day, I definitely want to snap at them about how their attitude won’t be acceptable in the future. Because it’s just not right to insult someone’s passion the way students insult mine.

So it makes sense that teachers have done this, that we’ve told this lie. It makes sense that we’ve structured school, and thought about how we can teach our subjects, and explained this whole endeavor to students, on the basis of this fundamental assumption, this base falsehood, that the purpose of school is to prepare students for the real world, specifically for college, so they can get good jobs and make good money. It makes sense – though, teachers, I won’t take us off the hook entirely, because we really should have recognized the falsehood in this, and seen the hypocrites we make of ourselves, when we tell our students they should study hard specifically so they can make more money: because we are all so very well-educated, and worked so hard to become so, and we are so poorly paid for that effort and education. Did you all go to school, do all that work, and then take this very hard job, for the money?

Neither did I. (Though also, I expect and deserve and demand that I get paid what I am worth. So should we all.)

I do need to point out that we make this claim about the purpose of school in more ways than just talking about money. We do also talk about getting a “good” job, by which we mean a job you like and find fulfilling, a job that you feel has value, to yourself or to society or both. Teaching is all of those things for me, as it is for many of my colleagues; and the money has been generally sufficient, if not actually good, or representative of what I’m worth. We do also talk about getting our students prepared, with skills and knowledge, for the real world, beyond and apart from college. I think we do that, a little. Not enough, though also, here we run into a question of how much someone can be prepared, in school, for the world outside of school, and also how much someone should be prepared in advance of actually living. But regardless: our efforts to prepare students for the real world, as we call it, are founded on the same principle: we try to get them ready for their jobs. We want them to have work skills, and know how to find a job, apply for and interview for a job, succeed in a job. When we talk about our students’ future – other than some basic insincere lip service to the worn cliches “You can be anything you want to be!” and “You can do anything you want to do,” – it’s always the same basic idea. It’s all about the money.

Okay. So those are the lies. Now: are you ready for the truth?

Deep breath.

The truth is, you can not be anything you want to be. You can only be yourself.

The truth is, you cannot do anything you want to do: there are limitations on all of us, some internal, most external.

The truth is school does not prepare you for college or for work. Only you can do that, and no matter how well you do manage to prepare yourself, you will still be surprised, and sometimes unprepared and overwhelmed; and to some greater or lesser extent, you will fail.

The truth is, school is not preparing you for the real world: you are already in the real world, and you always have been. And no, it doesn’t get better. It doesn’t get easier.

The truth – the big truth, the last truth – is that the purpose of education is not, cannot be, and should not be stated as, helping students to get a good job or to make more money.

The purpose of education is to create more life.

***

Okay, that was a lot of truth. Take another deep breath, and then I’ll soften it up some, make it easier to swallow and to digest.

By the way: we absolutely should teach our students how to breathe. There’s nothing more important. Literally.

Okay: now for the softer side of the truth.

While it is true that you can only be yourself, that is also the very best thing you could ever be. Because every single one of you, of us, is as good and valuable and worthy as every one else; and there is also no other person you could be as successfully as you can be yourself. It’s also true that figuring out who exactly you are is incredibly difficult and complex, and the work we do on that project in schools is good work. You get to explore your self and your society and your skills and interests, even while we are barking at you that you need to master proper MLA format for your resume.

While it is true that there are limitations on all of us, which keep us from doing anything we want to do, limitations can be overcome. Muggsy Bogues played a full career in the NBA despite being only 5’3” tall. Also – and this may be even more important – a lot of things we think we want to do are actually really bad ideas. When I was 6, I wanted to be a stage actor, a fireman, and an astronaut. All bad careers for me, for the person I became – especially all at the same time.

The truth is that school does not prepare you completely for college or work: but the truth also is, it helps. We will, as I said, always fail, in college and career and life; but no failure needs to be total, or permanent. Failure always precedes growth. And – heh – school can prepare you for failure.

Unfortunately, the truth – and I cannot soften it – is still that school does not prepare you for the real world. But that’s because you’re in the real world, right now, while you are in school, and there’s no preparing for it, for any of us. There is only living it. Experiencing it. Learning from it. That’s all we ever do, whether in school or not. I do think it’s important that we teachers stop telling students there is some distinction between school and the real world, especially with the implication that the real world is somehow worse, harsher or harder, colder or crueller. People who really think that do not remember what it was like to be in middle school or high school. Or they do not understand the situations that many students, many children, live through. As I said: it doesn’t get better and it doesn’t get easier; but you will get better. And then, if you can, you will make your life better. And that process will continue for as long as you keep trying to learn and improve: always in the real world.

Last one – and, because I know my persuasive rhetoric, this is the important one. This is the point. This is what education is for.

Our world has, I believe, an objective reality. It’s not just in my mind, or in the Matrix. The world would – will – still be here when I am not here to perceive it; it will still be the same world when all of us are gone from it. Although it will be quieter, and less messy. No matter how I imagine the world to be, whether I think the Earth is round or flat, 6,000 years old or 4.5 billion, floating in space or resting on four elephants who are standing on a turtle – there is a truth, a real situation that I don’t change through my perception of it.

However: my perception of the world shapes my world, changes how I experience it, more fundamentally than I think we realize – certainly more than we think about very often. How we see determines what we see. We cannot perceive things that we cannot imagine existing; sometimes we cannot perceive them intentionally, consciously. Take the flat Earth example. If I believe, absolutely, that the world is flat, then there are things I will not do, places I will not go, because of my belief, because of my perception. I will not get on a plane that I think would fly off the edge of the world. I will not go to the world’s edge, let alone beyond it – so I will never see that there is no edge. So even though the world is in fact round, I will never perceive the world as round, because I will avoid – or more simply, deny – anything that would prove to me that the world is round. So for me, functionally, the world would be flat. And I will miss out on any experience associated with the round Earth. My world, shaped by my perception, would be less full: only two-dimensional.

Let’s take a more realistic and more common example. If I were a racist, and hated, let’s say, plaid people, then I would avoid, or dismiss as unworthy of my time, any and all plaid people. They would essentially not exist in my world except as an amorphous abstraction for me to hate and fear and blame. I would never get to know, never get to appreciate, never get to love, anyone who is plaid. And therefore my world, my life, would be smaller.

Because plaid people are some of the finest people there are.

And if you don’t know any plaid people – or, even more shocking, you somehow think that they don’t exist – I think you need to open your eyes and pay more attention. America’s no place for plaid-deniers.

But in all seriousness, this fact, that perception shapes reality, is true in all ways: things that we can’t understand, we avoid; things that we can’t conceive of, we don’t even perceive. And in contrast, when we have heightened understanding, we have heightened perception: my wife’s experience of an art museum is much richer, much fuller, than mine, because her knowledge of art, and her experience with creating art and the deep understanding of the artist’s craft she has thereby, lets her see the works on display in more ways than I can, who makes art only with words. My experience of literature is similarly fuller than most people’s. My dog’s experience of the world of smells is many thousands of times more complex and interesting than my experience of smells: which is why he chooses to sniff cat poop, which I simply avoid. Because he finds it interesting, and I just think it smells gross. But I have to assume that if I could smell what he can smell, I would interact with cat poop the same way he does: my nose would be riveted to every turd. Think how much more enjoyable it would be to live with cats, then. Having the litter box in the house would be a benefit. Maybe we’d put the box on the coffee table. Make it a conversation piece.

I know that sounds bizarre and insane. It sounds that way to me, too. But understand: it only sounds that way because of how we perceive cat poop. Or rather, how we don’t perceive it. How our experience of the world is limited by our range of perception.

Education can change that (Maybe not with cat poop.), because education can introduce us to things, and show us how to perceive them. I wasn’t born reading literature the way I do; I learned that. Because I learned it, my experience of reading is better than most people’s. My world of books is larger, more vibrant, more diverse, more entertaining, more inspiring, more challenging, than most people’s book world. Not because I’m better than other people, not because I’m just built different: because I have been educated. Because I learned. Because I learned how to read and understand what I read to an unusually high degree, I have a larger world to live in. It means I can find greater pleasure and fulfillment in the world of books. I will never get tired of reading books. I will never be bored, not as long as I can get my hands and my eyes on books. I can still perceive all the non-book things as well as all the rest of you can – though some people perceive individual pieces of non-book-reality better than I can, because I don’t know much about cars or sports or calculus, or about being a parent, or about traveling to other places or into other cultures – but in the areas where I learned well, my world is larger than the world of people who didn’t learn as well. In all the areas where I am not ignorant, my life is larger than the world of ignorant people. I live a larger life, in a larger world, than someone with less education with me.

That’s why I’m a teacher. Because I love humanity. Because I want to help people to live larger, fuller, richer lives. To have more chances to be human, to be more human. To make miracles. What else could I possibly do that would be as valuable, as important?

But, you see, my work has, of late, become less valuable. Less effective, and therefore less important.
Because my students are less willing to work with me, to listen to me. They are less willing to learn.

But that’s our fault, teachers, parents, adults in general: because we’ve been lying to them. And they have caught on. These are the unintended consequences of our choice to use the threat of future poverty and failure to scare our students into obedience. Rather than explain the real value of education, even though the idea is complicated, even though it is hard to accept, we have chosen to use the simple lie that the entire point of education is to prepare students for future work. We still tell them, as we have for years, that going to college is the best way, even the only way, to get a good job and make good money, and the point of compulsory public education is to prepare them for college and for jobs – and that’s it. It’s not all we think education is for, but when we are frustrated with difficult and disobedient students, we don’t usually talk about the wonderful benefits of education: we just threaten them. “If you drop out, or get expelled, how will you get a good job? You’ll be flipping burgers for your whole life!”

But, see, we have now gone through a pandemic, and more than one recession; today’s students are in the world of social media, which gives them access to people’s lives and internal thoughts. So they’ve seen behind the curtain, they’ve torn down the veil. They know that there are countless people who have good jobs without ever having finished college, and countless people with lots of education who have miserable jobs. And now college is so absurdly expensive that even those who would want a college-level job – for whom a job that required a college degree would be a “good” job – are not willing to accrue the debt to get that job, and so they’re looking for different jobs, ones that are easier to get, that have fewer requirements. Or, more often than I think we educators realize, they have come to the conclusion that life is not, and should not be, defined by a job: and so what job they end up with simply doesn’t matter to them, as long as they make enough to survive and do what they want to do. What they want to think about and plan for is all the non-job parts of life.

So here you are, students. You’ve been hearing for years, again and again, that school is necessary for getting into college and getting a good job. And you don’t want that. And you know that we are lying to you, that you don’t need college for many good jobs. You also know that life shouldn’t be only about a job.

What, then, is the value of this education we offer and demand, for a student who doesn’t want what we have claimed is the main and even the only goal of that education?

There isn’t any. So you don’t want it. Of course not.

And the more we try to threaten, and cajole, and cozen you into doing the difficult work of education anyway, the more you resist. Of course: you don’t like being lied to, and you don’t like having your time wasted. Wasting time is wasting life, and we all want all the life we can get.

So you ignore and evade and escape education that is nothing for you but life-draining, time-wasting oppression.

And therefore you remain more ignorant than you could be. Not totally ignorant, of course, because you learn on your own. But school could teach you so much more than you can easily learn on your own; and without putting effort into school, you will absolutely know less than you would if you could really do this the way it should be done.

And since you will know less, therefore you will have less life.

***

It has to stop. We need to stop telling students that school equals college equals job equals money. We need to stop focusing on money. I don’t teach literature because it makes money, either for me or for the students – or even for the authors, who I do think deserve money for their work; but that’s not why I want the book, and it’s not why I want to teach the book. I do it because literature expands and improves my experience of being human: and I want that larger life. And I want other people to have what I have. Especially now: because the world kinda sucks. And especially the kids I teach: because being in middle school and high school kinda sucks.

Teachers: we need to tell our students the truth: school sucks, but education will make your life suck less. It will give you more life, and a better life, because it will let you understand more, and therefore do more, and perceive more. And we need to believe this when we say it, and we need to want that for our students.

Otherwise we should all just give up and become janitors.

At least then the world would be cleaner.

Separate Has A Rat In It

Dusty Leave a comment

All right: so I have two classes of College Readiness, and they both had to write a UChicago essay — and they both picked a prompt for me to write. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this. If you want to see all the prompts, go here.)

The other class chose this one:

People often think of language as a connector, something that brings people together by helping them share experiences, feelings, ideas, etc. We, however, are interested in how language sets people apart. Start with the peculiarities of your own personal language—the voice you use when speaking most intimately to yourself, the vocabulary that spills out when you’re startled, or special phrases and gestures that no one else seems to use or even understand—and tell us how your language makes you unique. You may want to think about subtle riffs or idiosyncrasies based on cadence, rhythm, rhyme, or (mis)pronunciation.

Here is my response.

Language Separator

See the rat?

I am a dull man. 

I am utterly unspecial, solidly in the mainstream: I am a white American male, cis/het, raised vaguely Christian but now a non-practicing atheist. I am married. I am 49 years old. I own a car and a house, with a mortgage on the house. I have a Bachelor’s degree, more debt than savings, and I vote Democratic. All completely “normal,” in that people who look and live like I do have made sure that our culture believes that people who look and live like I do are the norm, the standard, the expectation – and therefore everyone else is a little weird, a little off, a little less than what they are “supposed” to be. Like most people who look and live like me, I am aware of my privilege, I oppose the unfair societal structures and institutions that promote it – but I don’t really do too much to change them, because after all, I do benefit from them. I feel guilty when I think about that, so I try not to think about it.

Sorry: that went too political. (I am keenly aware that some people find it awkward and uncomfortable – challenging – when I speak of political matters. I do not want to offend them, so I usually do not speak of political matters.) My real point is that there is very little about me that is, according to our society’s generally understood and accepted standards, abnormal.

Until I open my mouth.

My mouth itself is pretty normal (Though I have WAY more fillings than is normal, I think – over 40, with 5 crowns. I have abnormally bad teeth.), it’s what comes out that is abnormal. First of all, I have a weird accent: my parents (The most important influence on a person’s accent and dialect) are from the West Coast, Washington and California, so I speak somewhat in their accents; but I was raised first on Long Island, which has a distinct accent, and then in a suburb of Boston, which has a STRONG accent. I didn’t acquire or keep either of those accents in their entireties, but I did pick up a few pronunciations; and more, Boston’s speech patterns were strongly influential: I speak too fast, as Bostonians do, and I talk faster the more excited I get; and I cuss intemperately. So I sound like a mishmash of two coasts and four states.

It’s more than my accent and my speech patterns, though: it’s what I say.

Don’t get me wrong: I am a student and an artisan — a wright. A smith. — of language. I study literature and rhetoric, and have mastered them to a degree that allows me to teach, generally successfully. I possess linguistic capacity more than sufficient to enable the utilization of language both fanciful and ornate, drawing from the recondite and recherche realm of jargon as well as splashing through the filigree fountain of poetry.

I talk good, is what I’m saying.

 And, as you can see, because I can use language well: I can also abuse it.

My favorite form is mispronunciation. I enjoy completely destroying the actual sounds of words, especially foreign ones. Especially French. Because if any language has worse pronunciation than English, it’s French. That word I used between “recondite” and “realm?” I would enjoy saying that “ruh-churchy.” So I feel that we should pronounce La petite fromage, the little cheese, the way it is spelled: lah puh-teet froh-midge. I draw from classic influences to pronounce the K and the G in “knight,” and to describe for my students when they put the emPHAsis on the wrong syLLAble.

But mispronunciation alone is too simple; a little tame, really. Much more funner is improper forms of words, particularily when the wordination is constructicated of rootages and suffixery (Holy crap, autocorrect accepted that one!  Is that really a word?! Mmmmno, it’s redlined. I think I stunned the autocorrect.) that are close, almost recognizable — but also completely wrong. That’s the besterest. Though one step higher here is when I can corrupt a common usage of a modern slang term in order to make it seem more grammatical while also being deeply annoying: when I was on Twitter, for instance, I made a point of saying I twitted a twit, not tweeted a tweet – because after all, it wasn’t called “Tweeter,” was it? (Now it should be xitted a xit on Xitter, not xeeted a xeet on Xeeter. Though either one would presumably make Elon Musk apoplectic, and that’s a good use of language.)

I admit it’s a touch upsetting that I say these kinds of things and play these kinds of games with my students, because for some reason, they trust me to steer them right with their usage of English, the poor innocent fools; I’m sure I’ve given more than one a bad idea about words from some joke or other — though I will further admit that that’s funny. I do teach them the real insane trivia hidden deep in the pockets of the English language: the word floccinaucinihilipilification (WHICH I TYPED RIGHT THE FIRST TIME) and the sentence “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” Both of which are real. And “Y’all’d’nt’ve,” which is not real, but should be. These all show actual facets of this mad and madcap and maddening language that I love, so they are all lessons, on some level, at some point. And I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that most English teachers do not teach those lessons.

Then there are the foreign accents (Or as I am fond of saying, the furrin accents, which we don’t talk here in ‘Murrica.). A number of them show up when I read aloud, when there is some identifiable speech pattern in the dialogue, or a clear setting in an accentish area. I’ll read British stories in my best London fog, and I’ve read ev’ry danged word of Huck Finn by that Mark Twain feller in my best countrified speechery. I do sometimes use my past exposure to New York and Boston accents to play those characters when reading, especially if someone needs to be a tough guy; but I don’t put on my Pepe Le Pew when I read Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace.” And I never use Apu Nahasapeemapetilon’s accent, not even when I read The God of Small Things. On the other hand, I will neither confirm nor deny that Neil Gaiman’s story “Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains” retains a place in my Fantasy Literature elective specifically because I get to use my Scottish brogue.

Of course, none of these accents have the same color, force or frequency as my pirate accent. Not only because I dress up like a pirate for every Halloween, and dress up my voice like one on every September 19th (International Talk Like a Pirate Day, if ye be of the uninitiated). Also because I love doing that accent, and so it shows up whenever anyone makes a pirate reference around me, which is fairly frequent given my reputation and the assorted pirate paraphernalia which I have acquired over the years. If anyone tells me a pirate joke, I am honor-bound to respond in the appropriate manner: “AYE LAD, THAT WERE A FINE SALLY — I’LL SHARE IT WITH ME OWN CREW, THE NEXT TIME I WANT THEM ALL TO FALL ILL OF VILE PUN-ISHMENT! HAR HAAARRRRRRR!!”

Even this list, though, is not exhaustive, because it doesn’t include the character voices I use. In class there are a few definite ones; I am very fond of the voice of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, as performed by Andy Serkis; it’s a bit rough on the throat, but so very taassssstttyy, precioussssss… And just to one side of that, almost two sides of the same coin, is the voice of Edna Mode from The Incredibles, which I also love using, as long as it is attached to the right character (NO! CAPES!). Those two are my favorites, though also I am not above talking like a Goodfella (“Do I amuse you? What am I, some kinda clown to you?”) or the Lennie of the cartoons (“And I will hug him and pet him and love him and squeeze him and call him George!”) though never when I read Of Mice and Men because that book makes me cry and I can’t make fun of it that way. 

And it goes on from there. When I am reading test directions aloud and I get to a portion that is capitalized or in bold print, I will shout those words at the top of my lungs (“DO NOT WRITE IN THE MARGINS OF THE ANSWER SHEET”), without any warning at all; partly because I like to make my students jump (and laugh, because breaking the tension is part of my job), and partly because I want to make fun of the directions, which are universally terrible. I can actually sing reasonably well, but when I sing in class I usually make my voice sound as awful as I possibly can, intentionally breaking and scratchy and missing all of the notes. I sometimes read as fast as I can, which thanks to my Bostonian upbringing is pretty damn fast, so that all the words run together into a completely indistinguishable fog of sounds.

So the question is: why? Why do I do this? Why am I like this? Especially given my responsibility as a teacher, and my deep and abiding love for my language, and for speech both written and spoken?

Honestly? I don’t know.

It might be because I don’t want to conform. I have to follow the rules in too many ways already; even worse, I have to fight for the rules, have to make other people obey them, have to get them in trouble when they break them: and I hate that. I also can’t stand it when people turn up their noses – or even worse, break into that violent, assaultive cackle that people put on – when they catch someone saying something “wrong,” and they take advantage to say, “It’s ‘wrongly,’ you pathetic dolt!” I hate the arrogance of that, the contempt of it. I hate the hard-edged insistence on rules: when we all know that in English, the rules don’t apply. Tell me the “I before E rule.” Go on. I dare you. 

There are no rules in English, other than the only rule that matters in any language, in any form of communication: if communication was successful among all parties, then the language was effective. That’s it. That’s the whole point. We speak and we write in order to communicate something. Sometimes there is a secondary purpose (or even a primary one) such as intimidation or seduction or persuasion; but in those cases, the goal of the intimidator or seducer or persuader is still a goal that must be communicated, even if only by achieving it. But if my audience can understand what I want them to understand, then nothing else matters: that’s the truth. That’s what I want people to understand, to absorb and believe. That’s why I tell my students (sometimes to the chagrin of my fellow English teachers) that you may start a sentence with “and” or “but,” and you may use “I” in a formal writing context, and you may use contractions, as well. And you may cuss: because sometimes the only word that properly communicates one’s message is “FUCK!!”

Oops. Got too offensive there. Now this document’s going to get flagged. A much worse F-word.

I love playing with English. That’s why I love ee cummings (Even though much of his poetry is political, and even more of it is offensive: but all of it is fun.), who wrote like this:

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe

than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

less bigger than the least begin

less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly

and more it cannot die

than all the sky which only

is higher than the sky

 and why I admire and enjoy the novel Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (Even though it is very political, and therefore quite offensive… but it’s okay, because Russell Hoban also wrote this), which looks like this:

Looking at the moon all col and wite and oansome. Lorna said to me, ‘You know Riddley theres some thing in us it dont have no name.’ 

I said, ‘What thing is that?’ 

She said, ‘Its some kynd of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it wernt you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it dont even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.’ 

 and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (Which is both extremely political and EXTREMELY offensive, so…maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.), which looks like this:

“What’s it going to be then, eh?” 

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this evening I’m starting off the story with.

and all the fantasy novels and science fiction movies and so on that make up entirely new languages, and then translate them into English: because language is fun. The more fun you have, the better it works. The more fun it is, the more you want to use it: and that makes more communication, which means more connection, which means more peace, love, and understanding.

And that would be the besteresterest.

The point of this essay was meant to be what in my language use sets me apart, divides me from other people; I do think it is the degree to which I mess with language, the number of games I play with it, the variety of ways I push the bounds of what is acceptable and what is normal. I do all those things more than most people; and that’s what sets me apart. What I don’t try to do, ever, is make my language harder to understand, to make communication fail: it is maybe my worst habit as a writer that I always try, over and over, to make my communication more clear, to explain further, to give another example, another synonym. As you can see. It makes me much too wordy in my writing. But it also makes me a good (if talkative and boring) teacher. It makes me a good friend, and a good husband, because I always try to explain what I am thinking and what I am feeling; I always try to communicate (And I realize that communication also requires listening, if you were thinking that I do all the talking. I don’t. It’s just that my turn takes three or four times as long.). My wife and I rarely fight because of that, and our fights usually end in compromise and agreement: because we communicate. (I don’t deserve all the credit for that. My wife is exceptionally good at understanding me, and herself, and she listens too. She is also very patient with me, which I appreciate forever.) I think it’s good that I am able to use humor to break up those long, repetitive speeches in which I try to explain everything I am thinking, over and over again.

I just wish other people enjoyed my portmanteaus as much as I do.

Oo! That’s one I forgot to mention! Portmanteaus: when you put two words together into a single word, like breakfast+lunch=brunch, or smoke+fog=smog. I love those things. I think of them constantly, and I bring them up all the time – here, wait, I have a list of my favorite ones.

What’s that? Oh – you have to leave? No time to discuss word nerdery with me? I understand. 

Maybe next time.

And then again: maybe not. 

Just know that I’ll always be here, ready to talk about words, ready to play word games – and ready to communicate. And whether that makes me different, or makes me just like everyone else, I don’t actually care. As long as we’re having fun. And not being … too offensive.

Oh and — fun being offensive? That’s offunsive. And that is a portmanteau.

Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself

Dusty Leave a comment

So I recently got asked to do a second interview by the same website that interviewed me before, though now it was for a new — page? A new site? A new theme? I dunno, it was an interview, and it was all done through email, so that’s the kind of interview I like. They did a lovely job with both interviews, I thought. So go check it out, give them some views, maybe find out something about me and my writing.

Here it is.

And then a couple of months ago, a student of mine had to make a website about a teacher, and he chose me. I am a little displeased that he included every time I said “like” in the interview, but he was certainly accurate in his transcription. And otherwise, it’s a lovely site and a flattering compliment.

Go look at it.

All right: and then, for some new content in this post, I looked up Bad Interview Questions, and got this list of 100. I am not going to answer them all: they are British, some are about sports, some are Gotcha questions about physics that I do not know. But maybe this will be fun. Let’s see.

Credit where credit is due.

Cue ridiculous interview questions…

1.‘ If you could be Batman or Robin, which one would you be?

Come on. Batman. Let’s not be stupid. Who the hell would say Robin? “Would you rather be a billionaire playboy who is secretly the coolest gadget-centric superhero in history — or a ward named after a bird?”

2.‘ What football team do you Support? ‘ Why them?

No, we’re not going to answer that.

3.‘ Do you prefer cats or dogs?

I do not. All pets are wonderful.

4.‘ Why on earth are you here today?

On Earth? As a human? I think our purpose as conscious beings is to experience the universe in whatever way we can. I think our purpose as human beings is to create art and discover truth. I want to do all of those things. I’m here today because it’s today, and I should be here: on this blog, posting.

5.’ What was the most traumatic experience to happen in your personal life?

Definitely not going to answer that one.

6.’ Sing a song that best describes you.

I mean…

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FugMG9EtMxw%3Fsi%3DJfyjHBZ6ckpoVyER

7.‘ When you go on holiday, when do you pack your case?

Morning of or night before.

8.‘ What would I find in your fridge right now?

Food? Cheese, milk, soda, beer, leftovers, some vegetables, buncha condiments… food. Nothing shocking.

9.’ How would you explain a database in three sentences to your eight year old nephew?

My question would be: how the hell did I get an eight-year-old nephew?

10. ‘If aliens landed in front of you and, in exchange for anything you desire, offered you any position on their planet what would you want?

I don’t see the downside here. Why is this a trade?

11.’ If Hollywood made a movie about your life, whom would you like to see play the lead role as you?

Imma go with Jameela Jamil. I’d like to be that beautiful once.

12.‘ If someone wrote a biography about you, what do you think the title should be?

Cap’n English Sings The Blues

13.‘ If I assembled three of your format supervisors in a room and asked them about you, what would they say about you that you would say is not true?

First YOU tell me what a format supervisor is.

If you asked my former principals, they would probably say that I was stubborn as hell. I’m not: except when the policy is stupid, and then no, I won’t obey it.

14.’ How would you design a spice rack for a blind person?

Specific single-jar dividers and either braille or raised letters to identify each spice.

15.‘ If you were a character from Star Wars, which one would you be?

Darth Vader because he’s the best. The most like me is probably Obi Wan Kenobi: I think I’m a good enough teacher, but I’ve probably helped create the end of all good things, and my winning move is sacrificing myself.

16.‘ Sell me this glass of water.

*Grabs collar*

*Smashes water glass across face*

*Threatens with shattered glass shards*

“GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY!”

17.‘ What has been your most bizarre life experience?

Teaching for 24 years.

18.’ Why are manhole covers round?

So they don’t fall down the hole.

19.‘ What do you think would be a fitting epitaph on your gravestone?

“I’m Crowded…. Roll Over”

20.‘ What’s the most interesting holiday you’ve ever had?

My first Christmas with my wife, when she went back to visit my mom with me in Massachusetts and I almost killed her with a train.

21.‘ What would you choose as your last meal?

My own heart.

22. ‘How would you define your personal work-life balance in terms of ratio (50/50 70/30 etc)?

I think 50/50 is probably accurate, but I’d like to shift that to less work and more life, more like 30/70.

23.’ Given the numbers 1 to 1,000, what is the minimum number of guesses needed to find a specific number, if you are given the hint ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ for each guess you make?

One if you guess it right.

24.‘ Using a scale of 1 to 10, rate yourself on how weird you are.

Banana.

25.‘ Explain quantum electrodynamics in two minutes, starting now.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fJQEOX0-cFQ%3Fsi%3DTPhPKXkk096DLwhk

26.‘ How many balloons would fit in this room?

Inflated? Several hundred. Empty? Probably hundreds of thousands.

27.‘ If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?

I’d be poured out with the rest of the goo. Now you tell me why the fuck you picked a pencil as the size comparison for a question about blenders.

28.’ You have a bouquet of flowers. All but two are roses, all but two are daisies, and all but two are tulips. How many flowers do you have?

Three: one rose, one daisy, one tulip.

29.‘ What is the philosophy of martial arts?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=LMIfAmQYig8%3Fsi%3DQFXvpvNtV4C0oooP

30.‘ Explain to me what has happened in this country during the last 10 years

The culmination of the 50-year project by the corporatocracy to create their utopia, in which the rest of us rank somewhere between slaves and livestock.

31.‘ If you could be any superhero, which one would you be?

I’m tempted to say someone with infinite power, but I’d really just like to be Spider-man.

32.’ How do you weigh an elephant without using a scale?

Guess ten tons: if the elephant is flattered, double it; if the elephant is offended, halve it.

33.’ If you had 5,623 participants in a tournament, how many games would need to be played to determine the winner?

IT’S ME. I’M THE WINNER.

34.’ How many bricks are there in Shanghai? Consider only residential buildings.

No.

35.‘ You have five bottles of pills. One bottle has 9 gram pills; the others have 10 gram pills. You have a scale that can be used only once. How can you find out which bottle contains the 9 gram pills?

What the fuck kind of scale can only be used once?!?

36.‘ How would you market table tennis balls if table tennis itself became obsolete? List many ways, then pick one and go into detail.

I’d have my wife paint eyeballs on them.

37.’ How many Smartphones are there in London?

Nah.

38.’ You are in charge of 20 people. Organise them to figure out how many bicycles were sold in your area last year.

19 to ask around, one to ask you why you care.

39.‘ Why do you think only a small percentage of the population makes over ‘125,000 a year?

See Answer #30 about the corporatocracy. Income inequality is their mission.

40.‘ You have three boxes. One contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and one contains both apples and oranges. The boxes have been incorrectly labeled so that no label accurately identifies the contents of any of the boxes. Opening just one box, and without looking inside, you take out one piece of fruit. By looking at the fruit, how can you immediately label all of the boxes correctly?

Open the one that is labeled apples and oranges and pull out one fruit: if it’s an apple, then label that box as such, label the Orange box “Apples and Oranges” and the Apples box “Oranges.” If it’s an orange, reverse this.

41. ‘How many ball bearings, each one inch in diameter, can fit inside a 747 aircraft?

More than a couple.

42.‘ You need to check that your friend, James, has your correct phone number but you cannot ask him directly. You must write the question on a card which and give it to Heidi who will take the card to James and return the answer to you. What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure James can encode the message so that Heidi cannot read your phone number?

JAMES WHY THE FUCK CAN’T I ASK YOU DIRECTLY IF YOU HAVE MY PHONE NUMBER AND WHY DON’T I WANT HEIDI TO KNOW IT?

43.’ If you were given a free full-page ad in the newspaper and had to sell yourself in six words or less, how would the ad read?

“Buy me. I’m dope af. 100.” Gotta appeal to that Gen Z demo.

44.’ How do you feel about affirmative action?

It’s a poor solution to a much larger problem — but it’s better than nothing, which is what we have without it. And if you’re asking would I be willing to give up a job in favor of a minority candidate? Yes, I would, because I can go find another job, and I don’t think something, like a job I’m applying for, or a slot in a college, belongs to me when it… doesn’t belong to me.

45.’ You are given 2 eggs, you have access to a 100-story building.’ Eggs can be very hard or very fragile which means they may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from the’100th floor. Both eggs are identical. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break 2 eggs in the process.

Chuck them both at the interviewers while singing this:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-OgG0GwT-uY%3Fsi%3DknVMWKg342w1MhUk

46.‘ Are you a cat person?

No, just a regular human.

47.‘ If you were a salad, what kind of dressing would you have?

I think I am salty and bitter at heart, so that’s probably how I taste (Also describes much of my diet, so) — which means I’d say I’d taste best with something a little sweet. I’ll go honey mustard.

48.‘ How do I rate as an interviewer?

Banana.

Okay: I think that will do. Do I get the job?

#500 is #3

Dusty 2 Comments

So I noticed, not too long ago, that I was getting pretty close to 500 posts on this blog. That’s a lot of writing, over the last nine years I have had this blog, especially since there have been a couple of fairly lengthy hiatuses — hiati? — lacunae in those years. The majority of those posts are pretty substantial, some running to several thousand words and hours and hours of effort; though some are just short comments or jokes or links. But still, 500 posts seemed like a lot, and also a number worth celebrating.

And then I hit a wall, when my family crisis happened in October. That last post before the crisis was #497. And a month or so ago, I posted an explanation as to what was going on and why I hadn’t been following the carefully established once-a-week-new-post pace that I had maintained fairly well for about 16 months at that point; that explanation was #498.

Last week I posted about politics, and my desire to take up the fight. I will have more to say about that — but also, I couldn’t help but notice (though of course I already knew) that that was post #499. Which meant this one was the big one.

So what to post about? More politics? Teaching, which has been the bulk of the last 499 blog posts? I thought about a book review, because I have a good one to write.

But then this happened. I did it. It came in the mail.

Volume III of The Adventures of Damnation Kane.

It’s bizarre to me that this is such a clear mirror: but I had to take advantage.

This is not, of course, the finished book, because that will not be the cover image; my wife had a great idea for it, and she is prepping the board for the painting. (**Please note: if for any reason she is not satisfied with her image, then I will use something else for the cover; probably some old painting of pirates which is in the public domain. I’m just trying to say that the plan is for all three books to have original Toni DeBiasi covers, but if they don’t then they don’t, and so be it.) I printed one copy with a nothing cover as a galley proof so I could do one last edit of the text, which I find easier when it is printed on actual paper.

But the book is written. The story is done. This is the end of the Adventures of Damnation Kane.

Here they all are.

So this is my 500th post: it is announcing to all of you that the book is done, and it will be published and available within the next two months. And I am very, very proud of me.

Thank you for reading, to all of you who read, for whatever you read. If you are reading my pirate books, you’ll have one more to buy pretty soon.

Sure.

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Tired Teacher GIFs | Tenor
Australian Teachers Share The Frustrating Reality Of Their Jobs

It’s been quite a week.

A few of the highlights:

*Two of my classes are reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and this week we read one of my favorite sections, the two chapters when Scout goes to first grade for the very first time, and meets her new teacher, Miss Caroline. These chapters are the first which show the novel’s dominant theme, the idea of empathy, that you don’t understand someone until you see events from their perspective; Miss Caroline, seen from Scout’s perspective, is a terrible person who treats Scout badly, shames a poor farm boy named Walter Cunningham, and has no idea how to teach or manage a class. But when you see these chapters from Miss Caroline’s point of view — she is a 21-year-old woman, this is her very first day teaching, and in addition to several other problems, one of her sweet lil angels calls her a snot-nosed slut. First graders, man. Freaking savages. — you recognize that this teacher has had the very worst day ever. I explain the chapters from Miss Caroline’s point of view, which I understand as a teacher, and I show students how she is not bad, she’s just having a bad day. A lot of times in the past, when I’ve taught this, they get it; my students understand how frustrating and soul-searing Miss Caroline’s day is, and they realize she shouldn’t be blamed or hated for her choices, even when she screws up, as she does a few times. 

Part of Miss Caroline’s bad day is that she reads her favorite children’s story to the class — and they don’t react at all, because they are, as Scout puts it, “immune to imaginative literature.” And I look out at my class, half of whom are looking at phones or computers, another third of whom are chatting or spacing out while I talk about this novel, which I have told them is one of my very favorite works of literature, and I say, “Can you imagine what that’s like, to share one of your favorite stories with a class full of students who just don’t care? Who aren’t paying attention? To whom the story makes no difference at all? Can you imagine what that would feel like?”

They couldn’t.

Falling Asleep In Class GIFs | Tenor

*Yesterday a student climbed up onto a metal stool in my room in order to unplug another student’s Chromebook, which was plugged into an outlet that for no good reason is about seven feet off the floor, near my whiteboard. The student then called out “CANNONBALL!”, jumped off the stool, kicking it out sideways, landing awkwardly as the stool shot out and crashed into a bookcase.

Falling Chair GIF - Falling Chair Man - Discover & Share GIFs

*One of my other classes, in reading through a passage from the novel Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks, commented “I didn’t think these characters were African-American. They don’t have African-American names.” The names in question were Maud Martha, and Helen. One student pointed out that Helen is a Greek name, as a way of proving to me that these were clearly not African-American names. (I refrained from pointing out that the student’s name is Roman in origin, though the student in question is Southeast Asian.) Another student told me that the activities the family pursue in the passage are rural, country kinds of activities — specifically gathering wood for a fire — and that made them think the characters were White. To which I responded “Because rural areas are only White? And African-Americans don’t gather firewood?”

Did I mention that my principal was observing me that class? He was. His comment later was that I had had “several teachable moments” in the period. (He also said I handled it well, so that was okay.)

*Today one of my students came back from the restroom, started talking to the other students about something (This was, by the way, while I was talking about Miss Caroline and how it feels when students don’t listen to your favorite story), and at some point I realized that what they were saying was that this student, on the way across the hall to the restroom, had seen someone they didn’t recognize outside the school door (Which is mostly glass and is at the end of the hall near my classroom — who needs that “security” stuff?), that my student had let them in, and that the person in question, referred to both as “kid” and “guy,” was wearing a mask, carrying a backpack, and was currently in the bathroom. Refraining from asking the student why IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND HOLY they had let some literal masked stranger into the school, I went to the bathroom to see who was in there. There was someone in the stall, but I could only see shoes. So I quickly went to get an administrator to check on the bathroom, and then I went back to my class — where I received the clarification that the student had not let the person in, a teacher had, which almost certainly moved this from “Possible crisis precipitated by a student who lacks critical thinking skills” to “A student went out to a car, with permission from a teacher, came back in, and my student didn’t recognize them.” And the second option is what it was, and a few seconds later the administrator gave me a thumb’s-up on the way back from identifying the person in the restroom as one of our students. 

But it was a fun five minutes.

Loosing-my-mind GIFs - Get the best GIF on GIPHY

None of this is what I wanted to write about tonight, however. (Actually I wanted to write about it last night, but another thing that happened this week is my phone stopped working, so I spent last night ordering a new phone.) What I wanted to write about tonight was the worst thing I’ve dealt with in the last week. One of the worst things I’ve had to deal with all year.

Data Day.

Last Friday was our first Data Day. And the big problem with this particular occasion was that it was our very first Data Day at this school. At least the first one involving my department. To be sure, we have looked at data before: data is inescapable in public schools today. We start every school year with a brief overview of the school’s test data from the year before. Which is all about students who have already left the classes in which the data was collected, which might seem to some people as though it reduces the value of the data.

Some people.

Anyway, we look at data all the time. But I work for a small charter school, which has a hell of a lot of turnover in the staff and the administration, and every year things get a bit discombobulated and confusticated and lost in the shuffle; and so we have never done a Data Day like this Data Day. Unfortunately, those in charge of Data Day thought we had all surely done Data Days before, and so didn’t think we would need specific instructions about how one carries out a Data Day. But since we have never had a Data Day before, we did need those instructions, and we didn’t get them, and so the day was — awkward.

But hold on. Before we even get to the awkwardness of the actual day, I can hear you asking “Wait — what even is a Data Day?” 

A Data Day is when teachers get together in groups and look at the data for our students — in other words, their test scores. This Data Day was scheduled after we gave our first major standardized test this year, a practice ACT. The ACT, a sort of West-Coast cousin of the SAT, has four parts: Reading, English (grammar, that is), Math, and Science. Now, as I assume that all my readers are among the most astute people in the population, so I assume you have noticed that this selection of tests leaves out a few of the usual departments in a high school: Art, PE, foreign language, computer science, ESS (or SPED) — and, of course, history and social studies.

But that’s fine! Even if not all teachers have data and so can participate in Data
Day, the thing to focus on is the subjects which do have data. And lucky for me, English has double the data! And EXTRA lucky for me, this is my first year as head of the English department. So not only do I have double the data — but I get to run the meeting!

Did I mention that my principal was observing my meeting? He was. He did not tell me that I handled this one well. I think I did okay. We had several teachable moments.

But we didn’t have everything. We should have had our individual class data, from the shorter single-subject quizzes we’ve been giving over the course of the semester; we should have all been looking at our individual laptops and comparing our individual data to the school wide data, so we could find where our specific classes were different from the school population as a whole — that is, what are my 10th grade students failing to learn in my class, which the school as a whole is mastering? Those are the areas where I can make changes in my class in order to improve the instruction and the learning in specific skills and knowledges, to help my students catch up. And that was where we were supposed to develop our Action Plan, building SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) so that, when we have our next round of ACT practice tests in December, we can move straight into our second Data Day, and we can see what areas have improved and where we need to keep working, maybe finding new strategies that can make a difference in the scores. That is the goal of a Data Day.

I ran the meeting. Completely making it up as I went along, because I have never done a full Data Day. I didn’t tell everyone they needed to bring their laptops and individual classroom data. I didn’t have my individual classroom data. I had not examined the school wide data previously, and so while I pointed out a couple of obvious things — our students did better on reading and English than they did on math and science (I work at a STEM school, if you didn’t know.), better on English than on reading (which mystified me because they mostly can’t answer a single grammar question correctly — but I guess they can correct grammar on a multiple choice test?), and in some cases better, in others worse, when compared grade to grade. But everything I said was obvious. I didn’t know that we were supposed to create a SMART goal, or how to do that, and I didn’t take notes or guide the discussion or watch the time — or delegate any of those tasks. I did a bad job with the meeting. It was uncomfortable. That was my first Data Day.

So.

You all know that whole thing is a pile of horsepucky, right?

I knew you were all astute.

Okay, let me be clear: the basic idea of examining what my students know and what they don’t know, identifying areas where they have mastered the class content and where they still need work, and then strategizing methods to improve their learning? All of that is fine. None of that is horsepucky. We can get general ideas about how things are going, and we can find some ways to maybe make them better; that’s fine. It is a lot of work, for a questionable reward, and since I am already obscenely overworked, and still behind where I should be, I question whether or not this is the best way for me to spend my time; since I have 300 ungraded assignments turned in on my online education platform, I have a better idea of how I could spend a good couple of hours on a Friday afternoon.

Yup. Drinking.

I grade on Sundays. I shouldn’t. But I don’t have any other option. I’m not kidding about the 300 ungraded assignments, and that’s after I spend at least a few hours working every Sunday, and have done since the school year started August 1. A couple of hours on Friday afternoon, even if I hadn’t used that time as I deserve and gone drinking, would have helped make a dent in that pile — though of course it wouldn’t have eliminated the pile. But Data Day didn’t help at all. In fact it stressed me out so much that I didn’t even get my other tasks finished on Friday: I went home and collapsed uselessly on my couch. I did play some Minecraft, so that’s a win, I guess.

But let’s imagine that I did have some extra time, a couple of spare hours that I didn’t have to spend teaching class or working with students or grading essays. I could have done Data Day. I could have compared the results of a test which the students didn’t care about and didn’t try their hardest on, because they knew perfectly well they weren’t going to get graded on it, and that it wasn’t the official ACT, and therefore this test didn’t give them a chance to get a high score they could use to get into college or win scholarships; to the results of a series of short, five-question multiple choice assessments I give in my class, one for each standard they are supposed to master this school year. Those, also, the students didn’t care about and so didn’t try on. But hey, that makes the comparison more valid, right? The students taking it didn’t care, in both cases! Matching apathy! Also, neither set of tests was designed by me, or related directly to the content I used to teach the standards — none of them are on To Kill a Mockingbird, for instance. Oh, and also, the ACT is not broken down by standard, so I’m comparing a five-question multiple choice quiz on a single standard to a 40-question reading test and a 75-question English language test, on all of the standards taught in all four years of high school, and also quite a few that come up in middle school and a couple that are only used in college or adult life. Because one aspect of the ACT is that it is designed to be too hard, in parts, for any student to get a 100% on. Because the goal is to find the extent of a student’s knowledge and ability, right? If I give you a quiz on what you know, and you get 100%, I have not found the extent of your knowledge: those questions might cover every single thing you know on the subject — or they might only scratch the surface of your galactic levels of knowledge. To find out for sure, I have to make the questions get progressively harder until you cannot answer them correctly. That’s where I can assume your knowledge ends, when you can’t answer the questions any more. Which means the ACT tests, like all similar tests, is intended to get progressively harder until it becomes impossible for any high school student to answer the questions. 

Which means, of course, that there will always be gaps and areas for improvement, no matter how spectacularly I teach and the students learn, because of the way the test is designed. So if I take this concept seriously, that I need to teach my students enough for them to be able to score 100% on the test, I can never be complacent. Ever. I will always have more to teach. But of course, my students will move on out of my class before I finish teaching them; but that’s fine, they can learn the rest of everything in their next class.Right?

Sure.

More to the point, did you catch where I described how different the two tests are? Five questions on a single standard, compared to 115 on the general areas of reading and writing. Also, the standardized tests are given in very short timeframes, because the ACT’s base assumption is that the more you know about a subject, the faster you can answer the questions. An assumption that is so deeply flawed that it casts doubt on all of the ACT results — because of course speed has little if anything to do with knowledge or skill. A genius with bad eyesight or dyslexia or a headache the day of the test will not be able to answer all the questions within the time limit, which is 35 minutes for the 40 reading questions (which are about four different reading passages, with 10 questions each), and 45 minutes for the 75 grammar questions, which is just cruel. Oh wait, sorry: that’s only for the 11th graders. The 10th graders took shorter tests in shorter time limits — 24 reading questions in 30 minutes, and so on. But that’s fine, I’m sure we can compare the two classes and get some kind of useful idea of how much students know. Right?

Right?

Sure.

Here’s the part that killed me. Right at the start, when I’m trying to fumble my way through the schoolwide data we have about the ACT and Pre-ACT tests, and the middle school results from an entirely different assessment which the 6th-8th graders took, we were told to ignore the gaps in the test results that were caused by students who were having a bad day, or who had a headache the day of the test, or who didn’t care and so didn’t try. Because we can’t control those things. We need to focus on the places where we can have an impact, where we can raise those scores. 

Uhh — excuse me? How can we know which areas are lacking because of a flaw in the program, and which are lacking because students didn’t feel like trying their hardest? That’s right: we can’t. Just like we can’t see the specific standards for the questions on the ACT (I don’t think; there might be a way to break it down like that, but I didn’t know it, so.), and we can’t know if the five-question multiple choice quizzes give us good information, either, because in addition to being skewed by student apathy and also student humanity, five questions won’t do a good job of determining what the student knows and what they don’t. You can randomly guess on five multiple choice questions and have a not-insignificant chance of getting them all correct even if you couldn’t read at all. And also, let’s not forget that if a student learns all the material, but then fails the assessment because of a non-academic reason like a disability or an illness or a lack of motivation or a grudge against the school or the teacher or a bad testing environment or a bad breakup or a bad bit of potato they ate the night before which gave them vivid dreams in which they were visited by three different spirits of Christmas — that student did not succeed. They do not pass Go, they do not collect $200, because our system is based largely on high-stakes tests and the ability to pass them. And it doesn’t matter what I teach or how well I teach if a student who fails the assessment, despite knowing everything about my subject, is considered a failure. All of the things that I was told to ignore, because they are out of my control, are the entire reason why that hypothetical student could fail my class. 

But guess who would still get at least some of the blame for that student’s failure. And who would have to make SMART goals to try to improve that student’s test results. And who would have to examine that student’s data, again and again, to find the reason why the student was unsuccessful. But please, keep ignoring the aspects we can’t control, like a lack of motivation.

Right.

Sure.

And while we’re at it: who the hell told educators that we could control anything? Listen, you don’t know how hard I tried today, to make my students learn the lesson of Miss Caroline. And instead they were distracted by the possibility that someone had let in a school shooter — which was exactly where all their thoughts went when they heard that there was a possible stranger in the school, in a mask and carrying a backpack. Because of course that’s what they thought. And I’m supposed to teach those kids? To control their learning? To specifically assess the lessons that worked and the ones that didn’t, and to make adjustments which will ensure all the learning happens exactly as we want it to, which will then be shown clearly on the test?

Let me also say: if I go back tomorrow and try again to teach the same lesson, my students will say “We already went over this yesterday.” And if I say “Right, but you didn’t learn it as well as you should have, because you were distracted,” they will then reply, “That’s okay, we learned enough. We should move on.” And it wont matter how much I try to teach the lesson, how hard I want to reteach it, or whether I know exactly how to make that lesson more effective: it was ineffective because of events outside of my control. The opportunity was lost. We did not have a teachable moment today.

Here’s the truth. That neat, data-driven ideal, where teachers do the math and find the perfect way to help students reach mastery? School doesn’t work that way. Students don’t work that way, learning doesn’t work that way, even tests don’t work that way. None of it is scientific. None of it is precise. There are real benefits to teachers getting together and talking about what works and what doesn’t, and trading ideas and strategies; to that extent, Data Day was a real success. But otherwise? There is no data. Not anything real, not anything reliable. It’s all guesstimates, all gray area. Teachers do things that seem like they work, that seemed like they’ve worked in the past; students seem to learn things, and seem to get grades that reflect their learning. Somewhere in there, real learning happens, and part of it is probably because of what teachers do. But not all of it. And none of it for certain. Data Day is an attempt to pretend otherwise, to pretend that we can capture a mathematic truth about human beings, who are not by our nature quantifiable. And it just doesn’t work.

But hey, maybe that was just this time. All those things about human nature and whatnot? All out of our control. Let’s try to focus on what we can control, and we’ll circle back around in a few months and see what the data tells us.

Can’t wait.

Okay, Now What?

Dusty 1 Comment
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hvzHum9457w%3Fsi%3DCQZhyQZ7G_3VAmOO%26start%3D2515

Arguing has gotten me nowhere.


That’s not entirely true. I have had a metric fuck-ton of arguments in my life. It’s been a whole thing for me: it is a strong aspect of my teaching, mainly because it is a required essay format that all students have to learn, and so I always teach; it is largely what brought me online in a meaningful way, along with books, because my first two serious website interactions were with a book club and an argument site; it has taken up probably the majority of my online time (Though I don’t know how to measure that, really, so “majority” may be an exaggeration. But a lot of the time I have spent online, I have spent arguing.). I also argue with my students, but since they suck at arguing, that is closer to modeling good language use than it is an attempt to convince anyone of the truth. The online arguing is the larger issue. It has become a way I define myself, a point of pride; I tell my students, when I first introduce myself to them, that I am a pacifist — but I argue online all the time.


I mean that to be ironic. Why would someone who believes in peace and nonviolence and being nonconfrontational also go after people online?


And now I am thinking: maybe I should stop being ironic. Maybe I should just be who I think I should be, who I want to be. Someone who believes in peace, and nonviolence, and being nonconfrontational.
It’s not that simple, of course. Because one of the paradoxes of being a pacifist is that I have to live in a world in which people are violent and confrontational, and love fighting; so if I maintain my belief in being nonconfrontational and noncombative, all that happens is I get railroaded, and squashed flat, and violent people take advantage of me. The only way I can be a pacifist is, sometimes, to fight back against those who would create conflict, in order to maintain a larger peace. I believe that; I have accepted it. So I fight: I try to fight against those whose opinions would promote conflict and violence and abuse, both those who are bullies and those who work, intentionally or not, on creating a world where it is easier to bully.


So for the last few years, that has been my intent. I have fought against those whose political stance promotes the supremacist and fascist stances of the Republican party, particularly those who promote Trump and claim to oppose Covid-19 vaccines and climate change policies, because those three things — the devastation of the global climate, the suppression of medicine which prevents the spread of a deadly pandemic, and one orange-skinned motherfucker who wants to take over the world and make it dance for him and him alone — are the greatest threats we face, in my opinion. Trump is largely symptomatic, not causative, but the movement he represents is unquestionably an existential threat, particularly for marginalized and endangered communities. I do also argue against censorship, particularly in schools, and against the attempt to destroy public schools (both largely promoted by that same Trumpian movement), and I try to argue whenever I can for trans rights because I see trans people as the population currently suffering the most virulent and vituperative attacks, at least in my proximity.
I think it is a good thing that I have stood up for those causes, for those groups and those people, and against those groups and those people who would attack and do harm. It has not been good for me: that’s for damn sure. I get mad almost every time I get into an argument, and that is not healthy, neither mentally and emotionally, nor physically; it disrupts my sleep, spikes my blood pressure, distracts me from other things I want to do so that I am more often frustrated and unproductive, and therefore I take away from other things — like sleep, or relaxing downtime — so that I can accomplish my productive tasks. Because I already burned up my productive time arguing with some choad about how women’s sports do not need to be protected from trans women because trans women are women, goddammit.


But how much good have I actually done in all those years and years of arguments?


Probably none.


I hate that. But it is probably the truth.


I said last week that I have been persuaded, that I have read an essay by A.R. Moxon which showed me that my habit of fighting online is not only unproductive, but even damaging to the causes I believe in. Moxon pointed out that when someone — like me — says the same points that conservatives and fascists and transphobes and whoever have already heard before, it only shows those people that liberals and progressives have nothing new to say, all think the same things, only echo what we have been taught by our progressive liberal media sources.


The same things I believe about conservatives.


The more I argue, the harder this conviction sets in for my opponents. The more they believe that people on my side are fools, or liars, or mere puppets. I’ve seen this: I’ve seen people take my arguments as signs that I don’t understand the truth, or that I believe lies, or that I don’t care about truth because I have a political agenda; and even as I steadily disprove their points and prove mine, they simply become more strident in hollering that I am a liar and a fool and a sucker. Sometimes they do this while proving some of their points and disproving some of mine (Because while my stances are always right, my arguments are not always perfect, and sometimes I am mistaken), but whether they are right or wrong about their arguments, the point is that they become more adamant about never accepting my arguments, the more I argue with them.


My arguments, in other words, make people less persuadable.


This means that my arguing is bad for everyone. That cut out the last string that was holding up my need to argue. I already knew it was bad for me. I already knew I didn’t like it any more. I already knew I’m not actually as good at it as I thought I was, or told myself I was, in the past. But I still thought it was the right thing to do because I had to stand up for my causes: but not if I’m harming the cause by agitating the opposition, by making them harder to convince, not least because I almost always get mad and take that out by insulting my opponents, even though I know, and have taught my students for years, that insults lost arguments, that the second I mock my opponent, they stop listening to anything I have to say, even if everything else I say is deeply persuasive. All they focus on is the insult.


And rightfully so: because when my opponent insults me, I get so pissed off at that audacity that I no longer care about the argument: I care about showing that sonuvabitch that he’s not only wrong, he’s an idiot. I frequently prove that when I set out to do it – but it never helps. Of course. It just makes them madder and more smug, even while I keep getting madder and more smug. And of course, that leads to my worst habit: I am terrible about needing to get the last word. Even if it keeps me going back to a terrible argument, I keep doing it as long as the other person keeps replying to me. Even though I mock people for arguing simply to satisfy their need to win points and one-up people they disagree with.


Like I said. I need to stop being ironic.


It wasn’t just this essay that convinced me I need to stop. For one thing, I have walked away from arguing in the past – first when I finally escaped from the debate websites I started on, where I did the most harm to myself, wasting the most time, destroying the most sleep, wrecking my own mental health just because some asshat said something shitty about gay people or about public education in this country – or, God forbid, about gun control.


This was me. Of course.

Duty Calls



Also this. My wife, who has been trying to gently persuade me to stop hurting myself with this stupidity for just about fifteen years, has always been able to tell when I am arguing because I type harder and faster and with an angrier expression on my face.

Rage Keyboard GIF - Rage Keyboard Angry - Discover & Share GIFs

Though I’ve never actually shed blood on the keyboard.

So I’ve known for years that I should stop. I’ve had my wife telling me so, and she’s always right. (I never argue with her, by the way. I know my limits. Sort of.) I have also, in the last few years, recognized that my teaching of argument has not actually helped my students learn how to write better arguments: they write terrible arguments, both before and after my instruction. And I suspect that some of that is because I go into the teaching of argument mainly looking to win arguments, which is one of my favorite things to do in the classroom. But it has definitely struck me that my students still make the same terrible arguments now that they did five, ten years ago. And I can’t take all the blame for that: much of it is because of the inherent problem with arguments, and the problems with social media, which is where they learn to argue, and where they find the topics they want to argue about.


I’ve recognized the problem with arguing on Twitter as Twitter has descended into the depths of Hell. I don’t even want to be on the site any more. Even worse, the more I interact with assholes on Twitter, the more money I make for them, because Musk pays them for their number of interactions. So why do I still go there to argue?


Okay, I tell myself that I am fighting the good fight: but a week or so ago, I was arguing about who was the greatest tennis player of all time. Which is – you may be surprised to hear – not one of the important arguments I need to take a stand on. I mean, it was related, because the original post had the pictures of four candidates for GOAT, and they were, as might be presumed, all white men – Pete Sampras, Roger Federer, Rafael Nidal, and Novak Djokovic. But the correct answer, of course, is Serena Williams. So I commented that, and like a few other comments that had made the same argument; and then I found this thread where someone had posted Serena’s unmatched statistics – better by far than any of those four losers – and someone else had replied that Serena would lost a head-to-head match to any of them.
But that’s dumb. Because that’s not how you decide who the best of all time is. Nobody arguing about Michael Jordan vs. Lebron James talks about which of them would win a 1v1. You talk about their impact on the game, on their team; their championships, their individual statistics.


So I joined the thread and fought for my side. I made a joke (It was a stupid joke, but I thought it was funny) in order to mock the guy who had said Serena would lose head-to-head. And another guy started arguing with me: saying that I was wrong and dumb, because the way you decide who is the best of all time is exactly to debate who would win head-to-head, and even Serena has said she would lose against a male champion.


We went back and forth. For less time than some of my arguments about more serious topics, but still, this went on too long. And somewhere in there I realized: who decided how you debate the GOAT of a sport? Who says it isn’t about a head-to-head matchup? Did I have some special knowledge? Of course not: because actually, half the fight about who is the GOAT is arguing over which methods of comparison make the most sense. And in lots of these arguments, none of which is ever meaningful, the key point is indeed head-to-head. Boxing, for instance (which I had even referred to, because I’m a dummy), is almost always about head-to-head matchups, not statistics. So I had a bad argument, and was arguing in bad faith. And the worst part was that the other guy was funnier than me with his insults and comebacks. Which just pissed me off more – but since it didn’t make my argument better, I finally just quit.


He got the last word. And it was funnier. (Not really funny, to be clear. It was still a sexist argument, which I have problems with. But I tried to end with a barb, and he threw one back, and his was better than mine. Dammit.) Now, I still believe that Serena Williams is the best tennis player of all time – because she was more dominant in her specific competitive circumstance than Sampras or Federer or Nidal or Djokovic – but what did I gain by arguing for it?


Nothing. I just wasted my time. And I’m still wasting it, because I’m still arguing my point here, now, with you.


This is why I need to stop arguing online. And also why I need to stop arguing with my students.
But then that brings me around to the title of this piece. What do I do now? If I’m not going to argue (And to be fair, I doubt I will ever stop arguing entirely; I still exist in this world, and people say some appallingly stupid shit; and also, I do think there is value in standing up for my beliefs and for the particular people I advocate for – but I have lately been stopping myself before I post, and deleting the comment, and scrolling away from the initial post that made me want to reply; so I’m getting better), what do I do? Nothing?


I don’t want to do nothing. I think there are fights that need to be fought. Even if I am a pacifist, because as I said at the top of this, even we pacifists need to fight bullies, or else we allow suffering and oppression and violence to grow and spread in the world. And I can’t abide that.


The obvious things I can do are: I can try to persuade people, without arguing; and I can take actual action, to try to create political change around the causes I believe in, to try to limit the power of fascists and bullies.


I plan to do both. The political action is going to wait, for now, because I have too much other shit going on; I’m writing a book, dammit. And one of the other facts that makes it easier for me to give up arguing now than it has been in the past is the fact that I have been fighting the good fight – victoriously or not – for a long time now. It’s like teaching: I still want to do it as well as I can, because my students today matter as much as those I taught twenty years ago; but in terms of my own sense of self-worth, I have already accomplished every good thing I could ever hope to accomplish as a teacher. I could retire now and feel satisfied with what I have done. (I can not retire now and continue eating and having electricity and so on.) So even if I don’t take action right away, I don’t feel bad, because I’ve done a lot of good things in my life. But causes today matter, so I do want to take an active role, in some small way; specifically, I hope to volunteer for the Democratic party, or simply for my local jurisdiction, to help with the 2024 election. Because make no mistake: the only way Trump and the Republicans can win is to cheat. Which doesn’t mean they will give up: it means they will cheat. And that means we need to stop them from getting away with it. I live in a battleground state with a strong pro-Trump Republican power structure; so my help is needed and important. I’m going to give it.


But right now, in my classes and on this blog and wherever I can, I’m going to try to do what I should have done a long time ago: I’m going to try harder to persuade people. Not to argue with them, not to prove them wrong and me right; not to get the best dig or the last word. To persuade them. A.R. Moxon persuaded me that persuasion is this:

“Preaching to the choir” is simply giving voice to an existing desire for truth, in a way that helps people see things in a way they already know to be true, but gives them the language, the pictures, the words, to keep knowing it. It brings the message to those receptive, rather than falling into the supremacist trap of viewing persuasion as proselytization, a competitive sport of one mind’s victory over another. It honors unpersuadable supremacists minds by leaving them eating the salad they’ve shat on, free to be persuaded any time they want to become persuadable.

I actually don’t think there’s much that is more persuasive than giving people language to understand things they already know are true, to help them in the real work of individual persuasion—new language, new frames, new pictures.

Having that picture helps to more clearly understand the things we already know.

Understanding it more clearly helps us believe it is possible.

Believing it is possible helps us expect it to happen, and understand that we can do it.

A.R. Moxon, Preaching to the Choir

That is my new goal.


It’s not entirely new: I think I’ve been doing that for a long time. I think I have sometimes done it effectively. But I also think I could be a lot better at it, and a lot more thoughtful in my attempts to do it well. After all, I study and teach rhetoric – the effective use of language to achieve a goal – and I teach my students to examine the relationship between speaker and audience and subject, and the context, in order to determine what makes a piece of text effective. So why don’t I do that with my own writing?
Because I’m busy telling that asshole that Serena Williams is a better tennis player than Novak Djokovic, who is just taller and stronger. Like that determines who’s better. Please. If that mattered, then Shaquille O’Neal would be a great basketball player, instead of the overlarge stooge I’ve been arguing he is for years.


Enough of that. Enough arguing. Enough fighting.


It’s time to try harder, and to think more. It’s time to do good.


At least it’s time to try.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Rm1nCYOZB-s%3Fsi%3DrT8Wnaoh_Pb49SVd%26start%3D178

There Are No Rules

Dusty Leave a comment

for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

One of the difficult things about teaching English is the number of bad ideas that students have about the rules of writing. 

And one of the things I find most upsetting about teaching English is the number of bad ideas that students have about the rules of writing which they learned from past English teachers. For instance: one should never start a sentence with “and” or “but.” One should never use the pronoun “I” in a formal essay, one should only refer obliquely to one’s self, preferably in the third person. One should use transitions for every paragraph in an essay, because they help the flow; and one cannot go wrong with the transitions “First,” “Second,” “Third,” and “In conclusion.” And, of course, every essay should be five paragraphs, and every paragraph should consist of at least five sentences, and every sentence should be at least — but actually, I don’t know what the drones tell students the proper minimum length for a sentence is; I would guess about 10 words. Also one should never use fragments or run-ons.

Ridiculous. All of it.

There are no rules.

One of my favorite days as an AP teacher is when I mention to my new students that they can now ignore these rules, for the rest of their writing lives, and that, in fact, if they should never use “In conclusion” again, nor limit themselves to five paragraphs as a structure for an essay, they will make me very happy. The relief is palpable — and sad. We constrain young writers so much: and it helps to crush their creativity and desire to use words, and that is an awful thing to do both to young people and to this language. 

There are, I think, two reasons why teachers present these rules to their students as rules; and one of them is understandable, if not valid. The bad reason, the invalid one that is not understandable, is that teachers were taught these things themselves as rules, and they were never allowed to deviate from them, and so now these things are unbreakable rules: sacred cows, taboos never to be questioned, just like the prohibition on the use of the word “Fuck” (And all I really have to say about that is this). I was taught at least some of those things, too — though to be honest, I don’t remember learning them, so either I had genuinely good English teachers, or I spaced out at just the right time and never heard or cared about these rules — but come on. We grow up. We learn to think for ourselves. We see countless sentences that begin with “and” or “but.” We read countless pieces by authors who use “I” in even the most formal of essays. We stop counting words and sentences and paragraphs, and just — read. (I confess I still count pages. This, too, is a bad habit; but if we’re at the page-counting stage, at least the work is long enough that word counts and sentence counts and paragraph counts become moot.) WE FUCKING USE THE WORD “FUCK” WHEN IT IS APPROPRIATE: and we recognize that there are, in fact, many times, many times, when it is appropriate. 

So why don’t teachers teach their students that all of these things are bad rules? For one (And damn me, I first wrote this sentence starting with “Well,” and I HATE when my students do that, answer their own rhetorical question starting with “Well.” I caught it, though. Also, that’s not a rule.), teachers do not always question authority. Teachers come from all groups and kinds and flavors of people, but the majority are those who loved school, who were the top students, and who want to pass those wonderful learning experiences on to other people; those people never challenged a teacher in their lives, they were the ones who argued back against the students who did challenge the teacher, the ones who said “Shut up, he’s the teacher, don’t argue with him!” in class when someone else said “That doesn’t seem like the best way to do that.” And then they become teachers, and they don’t want to be questioned by students — who, to be fair, are completely freaking annoying when they argue, because they are used to having their points of view denied, their arguments summarily contradicted, usually by adults who say “Because I said so, that’s why,” or some permutation of that (Like “Because I’m the teacher, so don’t argue with me.”), and so all they have left is making one irritating point and getting a reaction from the authorities who squash them into molds, every single day. But this all means that when an English teacher says that a paragraph has to have a minimum of five sentences, and a student asks, “Why five?” The teacher wants to respond with “BECAUSE I TOLD YOU SO AND I’M THE TEACHER AND MY TEACHER TOLD ME SO WHICH MEANS IT IS A TEACHER’S RULE SQUARED!”

I am not one of those teachers. I did not like school. I questioned authority as a teenager (and I was annoying about it) and I continue to do so now, three full decades out of my teens. So I expect my authority to be questioned; in fact, I invite it. I never say “Because I’m the teacher, that’s why.” (Though I do jokingly argue with students who question my spelling, “How dare you question your English teacher on spelling?!?”) So when I tell students that an essay needs to be longer, or that a sentence is incomplete, and they question me, I tell them why. But then, I’m weird; I like arguing. I like explaining. I like helping people understand why something needs to be changed, why it is incorrect. I think doing that makes the world more comprehensible, and therefore more manageable. I think making the world more manageable for my students is my job, a lot more than making them write five-paragraph essays. 

The more understandable reason why teachers don’t tell students that these foolish rules for writing are not ironclad is more to do with arguments. Students like asking “Why?” Not always because they want an answer, either; but because they want to catch the teacher looking foolish, and they love to waste time and thereby avoid work. Sometimes, then, when they get the real answer, they’re not ready for it; so they don’t understand it, because they weren’t really listening — they asked the question only to make the teacher talk instead of assigning work, so when a teacher answers their question, the only response is “Huh?” So when you present one of these writing rules as they should be presented, as something that is entirely dependent on context and writing intention; that, for instance, the use of the word “fuck” in a formal essay, though not entirely forbidden (If you are quoting a character in a Martin Scorsese film, for instance, you have probably a 90% chance that any given quote will include “fuck,” and any form of censoring the word has a poor effect on the serious treatment of the film because it makes you seem too prudish to deal seriously with a movie that has profanity in it) does tend to contradict the tone of a serious essay, and is therefore jarring for the audience to come across in a context that doesn’t require the word be used; then you are going to get argument. Or stupid questions. Mostly stupid questions. (“Can we say it in class? Can I say it right now? Can I change my name to Fuckface McGee, and then you have to call me Fuckface all the time? Would you still say “fuck” if the principal was in the room?”)

So teachers, who deal with enough stupid questions as it is (And yes, by the way, there are stupid questions — see above), will often state an ambiguity as though it were in fact ironclad, just so they don’t have to argue with students. And since the argument won’t bear weight for the thing it is, we have to rely on even more annoying arguments which do have the advantage of shutting down debate: namely, “Because I’m the teacher and I said so.”

This is why, when I was in 3rd grade, the teacher told me that you could not take a larger number away from a smaller number, that 3-7=x didn’t make sense. Not because that was true, but because the teacher didn’t want to explain negative numbers to me right then. The same reason my mother, when I was 4 or so, told me, when I asked where babies came from and where specifically I had come from, that half of me was in my father and half of me was in her. And I assumed that meant that the bottom half of my body was inside one of them and the top half was in the other and they sort of stuck me together like a Gumby figurine (Don’t get that reference, kid? Look it up.), but also, the answer shut me up at the time, which was my mother’s goal.

I understand how annoying students are, so I understand teachers giving guidelines for good writing (It is a good idea to avoid saying “I” in formal essays for two reasons: first because talking about yourself personally is a way to connect emotionally with your audience, which is informal communication, not formal; and secondly because most of our desire as writers to use “I” is in phrases like “I think” and “I believe,” which we are tempted to use in arguments and statements of truth so that we don’t seem too arrogant, and so that we don’t seem dumb if we should be wrong. It’s safer to say “I think Martin Scorsese’s films say ‘fuck’ too often,” than it is to say, boldly, “Martin Scorsese’s films say ‘fuck’ too often.”) as if they were ironclad rules. It’s just that teaching these things as rules takes away all the nuance, all the flavor, from writing; it makes writing boring, which makes students not want to do it. It’s better to tell the truth, and deal with the consequences: there are no rules in writing that cannot be broken, it’s just a matter of what is the best use of language in a specific context.

And no, Jimmy, that doesn’t mean you can say “fuck” in your essay about Sacagawea.

So this went on much longer than I meant it to: this was meant only as an illustrative example, not as the heart of the essay. I really just wanted to talk about how we try to apply rules when there aren’t any rules, and shouldn’t be any rules, and that that is a problem. My main point wasn’t even about English: it was about life. Where there also aren’t any ironclad rules. That’s why I quoted the poem to start:

since feeling is first

by ee cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention 
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate 
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

I love that poem. I did a podcast episode on it if you are interested in the whole breakdown of what it’s about and what cummings meant to say in this; but for now, I just want to focus on his first stanza and his last two lines — sort of his introduction and conclusion, one might say. (Though please note he does not use transitions between his — err — paragraphs. Especially not “in conclusion” before the last one.)

So the first stanza: since feeling is first, he starts with, which means either that feelings occur first, before thoughts or actions or understanding or anything else, or else that feelings are more important than anything else, probably with both thoughts connected; but clearly, feeling is better: because he who pays attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you. I love that, because “syntax” is such a nerdy English writing/grammar thing to talk about; it means the way things are organized to create meaning (words, specifically, but you can have a syntax of almost anything that is organized to create meaning), so word order in sentences and sentence order in paragraphs, and aspects like word length and the use ofpunctuation and so on; all of that is syntax. For the lines about the syntax of things and kissing, I think specifically of this scene from the movie Hitch, where Will Smith’s character tries to teach Kevin James’s character how to kiss: but in this scene, it’s not only about the syntax of kissing and of relationships, but it’s about math: and so though Smith tries to get James to think about the passion of the moment, he focuses so hard on the proper methodology that he does not show any passion at all — and then he loses control and flubs it. 

The point is, there are not rules to kissing, and there is not math. And the more you think about rules and math and methodology for kissing, the less you are focusing on what you are feeling for the person you are kissing: and that means you are not kissing wholly. Because feeling is first. 

So with that in mind, let’s talk about the last two lines, and what I originally set down to write about today. 

for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

I love this because it can mean a bunch of different things, and that’s what I like best about poetry: in order to distill the language down to its absolute minimum, just the essence, poets take out much of what is usually there to provide meaning to the audience; this leaves the audience having to fill in gaps, make guesses — bring their own understanding to the conversation. Because of that, poetry does a better job, in my mind, of presenting what literature is supposed to be: a conversation, not a monologue. An author is talking about things they have observed or experienced or imagined, and the audience is listening and then agreeing or disagreeing — and adding to what the author says. A poet leaves more silence for the audience to speak, so though the poet may say the same thing in every conversation, the audience always has something new and different to say — and so one monologue can turn into almost infinite dialogues. I love that.

(And because I am pedantic and wordy, I don’t write poetry, I write novels. Heh.)

But because these last two lines use the names of two syntactical structures — paragraph and parenthesis — these two lines connect to the opening stanza: it is telling us that there is no clear structure to a life, and there is not a simple punctuation mark at the end of life that tells us exactly how a life is to be thought of — and maybe my favorite idea present here when I read this is the idea that death makes life silent, makes it unimportant, like a parenthesis makes the words that it contains, turning them from a main thought into supplemental but unnecessary additions. We treat death too often like it is the most important factor in a person’s life. It is not. The life that precedes it is far more important than death. 

But in either case, life is not a paragraph: it does not have a definite way that it is supposed to go, with a topic sentence to start (After a transition, of course), and then an illustration of the topic, and then two (or more) pieces of evidence or commentary on that topic, followed by a concluding sentence that shows the meaning or importance of this topic in the broader theme.

And then a parenthesis.

We think this way about life far too often. What actually set this whole discussion in motion for me was a conversation I had with my wife, in which she was railing against people who made decisions about how old other people should be to act certain ways, and how people should act based on what is appropriate for their age. 

I am certain you have all had these conversations. Most if not all of you have also made these prescriptions for other people, and probably for yourselves as well. Right? I mean, we all know it: we know that 8-year-olds are too young for R-rated movies with sexual content, and we know that 11-year-olds are too young to drive — and teenagers are mostly too old for dolls and stuffed animals. 

We know that 17 is too young to get married and have children, and that 50 is too old for those things. We know that 18 is old enough to make decisions for yourself, and 25 is when everything starts to go downhill. 40 is too old to buy a new sports car, because then it’s nothing but a midlife crisis; and the same with a second marriage to a younger person. And while we’re on that: 5 years is too much of an age difference when you are under 20, and 10 years is too much of an age difference when you are under 40, and two months is too much of an age difference when one of you is under 18 and the other is over 18 BECAUSE THEN THAT OLDER ONE IS A SEXUAL PREDATOR AND A PEDO AND SHOULD BE CASTRATED AND THEN FED TO WOLVES.

That last one is challenging: because I don’t mean to disagree that people under the age of consent should not have relationships with people who are older and may be taking advantage of them. But I do want to point out that the idea that the second someone hits 18 they are capable of taking care of themselves, and the second before that they are not, is absurd. 

This goes for all of this. There are certainly stages of life and development, and some of them are appropriate for some things and some are not; I do not think that teenagers should be running the country. I know lots of teenagers. They would not be good at the job. But also, the idea that octogenarians are exactly the right people to be running the country is not more reasonable, based on my experience of octogenarians. Especially those running the country right now (and the septuagenarians who want to run the country right now. Not better.) But at the same time, almost every stereotype and bias we have based on age is belied by not just one exception, but by a whole slew of them. Ten years is a big age difference for a romantic relationship, especially in one’s 20s — except my wife and I met when I was 20 and she was just about to turn 30, and we’ve been together now for the same 29 years that she had lived before she met me. I think it’s worked out pretty well. My father and his wife had a ten-year age difference, but since they met when he was 50 and she was 40 (or thereabouts), and since the man was the older one, nobody thought anything of it. And then, although everyone assumed that she would take care of my father at the end of his life, that went exactly the other way, and he was her caretaker until she passed this last February.

Now my dad is 82, and alone. Should he find someone else to love? Or at least have a partnership with, if not a romantic connection? Or is there not enough time left for him to enjoy a relationship? Would it be too much of a burden for him to put on somebody else, to love him for only the few years he has left? Would it be inappropriate for him to date? To date someone younger? Someone older? How much older? How much younger? How much life left is enough to fall in love?

It this is too much of a dark theme, let me ask a few others ones: should my dad have a sports car? Should he have a fun car, like a bright orange VW bug? Should he get a pet, if he wants one? Should he wear a bathing suit in public? Should he dye his hair, if he wants to? Get a tattoo, or a piercing? Or is he too old for that now?

It struck me in thinking about this that we make exactly the same decisions about the very young and the very old: just as most people would see my dad, at 82, as being too old for a fast car or a fast woman, or a new career or a new hobby or a style change that included something hip and modern, so people would think the same about, say, a ten-year-old: that a ten-year-old should not be in a romantic relationship (I agree with that one) and should not have a car (Less certain on that one) and should not have a career path picked out (Don’t agree with that one: if a kid knows that young what they want to do, then mazel tov: my wife knew she wanted to be an artist before she was ten) and should not get their hair dyed or their body pierced (Other than the earlobes, which apparently are fine for stabbing — hey, does that mean a child could get their earlobes tattooed? Or is that shocking and inappropriate?) or wear makeup, or wear clothing that is hip and modern and stylish. 

The way we bracket our lives, with the greatest constraints on the young and the old, turn those two stages of life, the beginning and the end, into — parentheses. We freeze both those times in our lives into immovable requirements: just like kids can’t wear makeup, and can’t possibly make decisions about their sexuality or their gender identity, women must get their hair cut short when they are older, and men have to start playing golf, and men and women both have to retire and may not begin a new job. Kids have to be cheerful and energetic, and old people have to be slow-moving and cranky. And anyone who doesn’t follow these rules, these iron-clad, unquestionable sacred cows, these taboos that are never allowed to change without disapproving frowns and pearl-clutching gasps, is deemed not only unusual or eccentric: but wrong. The butt of jokes, the target of angry stares and social ostracism. Because those are the rules: don’t question society, just do what you’re told. 

But no. Because there are no rules. Look at ee cummings’s poem: there are no rules. None that he follows. And yet: it makes sense, even more sense than what most of us write, even though we may follow the rules in order to make our words make sense. The fact that some people are better off following the supposed rules doesn’t mean those rules have to make sense in that way for everyone. Like I said, there are certainly stages of life and development, and children should not be romantic and should not be required to be responsible and adult before they are ready to be; but beyond the most obvious age distinctions around puberty and adolescence, there is no rule that actually encompasses everyone. And there shouldn’t be. Some kids can handle driving a car. Some could write books or create musical masterpieces. Some can know just what they want to do with their lives. Some can wear makeup and have pierced ears, and make it look stylish and cool. And just the same, while older folk are physically more frail and should take that into consideration when picking new extreme sport hobbies (And let me note: kids should be careful about extreme sports, too — because they are also frail, or at least small and fragile.), there too, there are no rules that encompass everyone. If Tony Hawk gets on a skateboard when he’s 80 (if he lives that long — and let’s hope so, because he’s one of those people who is awesome on the Betty White end of the scale) then I’ll watch him drop into the halfpipe, and cheer when he pulls off a trick. Because he could: and even if he can’t, I’d be happy to let him try, if that’s what he wants to do. It’s his choice. It’s all of our individual choices, and none of society’s business as long as other people aren’t getting hurt. Sure, Tony Hawk at 80 would be in danger of hurting himself on the skateboard: but do you know how often he has hurt himself on a skateboard while he has been young? And then adult? And then middle aged? Right. We let him do it. Because it’s his choice. People should be allowed to do what they want, without the weight of social disapprobation because of their calendar age. It’s stupid. 

Feeling is first. Life is not a paragraph.

Death is not a parenthesis. 

Time For My Annual Tradition

Dusty Leave a comment

It’s Inservice Time again!

That means it is back to work for me.

It is Icebreaker time.

It is time to travel to Phoenix, 120 miles away and approximately 120° Fahrenheit, because my school district wants to pretend that we are all one community — even one family.

It’s time for gratitude ponchos.

This is the time of year when a professional pedagogist who makes ten, twenty times my annual salary (sometimes for each appearance) comes to my school, and tells me why everything I’ve ever even thought about doing in a classroom is wrong, and therefore, if I don’t want my students to fail utterly at everything in life, and if I want to even dream about maybe keeping my job, I will need to change every single thing that I do: because all of it is wrong.

Essentially, this is the time of year when I get mad. Frequently. Vociferously.

And my wife is now tired of listening to me rant about this issue.

So now, Dear Reader, it is your turn.

So this year, when we drove from Tucson to Phoenix to spend time with our beloved school family (Which, if that were the case, seems like icebreakers wouldn’t really be necessary? You have icebreakers at family reunions? Or Thanksgiving?), after we had the icebreaker, we listened to a motivational-speaker-sort-of-pedagogist who wanted us to think of teaching in a new way.

She said that our minds are wired to consider certain weighty moments in our lives as what she called “temporal markers” (Or was it milestones? I didn’t listen too closely.), and said we take these moments — milestone birthdays, the start of a new year, the anniversary of some important occasion — as signals to move away from the past and orient towards the future. She said we give ourselves a chance, at these times, to start over with a blank slate: and that our minds actually promote this, by taking a new perspective, examining what has gone before, and then considering new aspirations. We see ourselves as having closed a chapter, and started a new one; and this gives us new energy, it clears away old thoughts and feelings and gives us room for new ones. She talked about this like it was a very positive thing.

She asked us, as pegagogists and motivational speakers are wont to do, to share with our table partners (Oh — we were assigned tables with random teachers from the other schools, so that nobody was sitting with anyone they knew well, because Lord knows the last thing teachers need to be at an inservice is “comfortable.”) how we marked these moments of change, from past to future, in our classes, in our daily lives. And I thought about it, and I realized: I don’t really do this. I mean, okay, sure, when I had my birthday three weeks ago, I thought, “I’d like to spend today doing the things I want to do for this whole year, so I can start a trend or a habit right now and continue it all the way until my next birthday.” But I didn’t follow through with it. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions — I quit smoking on December 28th, as I recall, five months after I turned 35. I started going to the gym more regularly last May, and stopped around November, and picked it up again in February. I don’t celebrate things happening in multiples of 5 and 10; in fact, the two numbers I think I notice most (Other than 420 and 69, which I always have to notice because I am a high school teacher and I know those are going to get a response) are 42, because of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and 37, because that’s how old Dennis is.

There’s some lovely filth down here…

And in terms of my teaching, I don’t have any kind of clean breaks: when one class ends, I almost always have students who stay after the bell to talk to me for a couple of minutes, which leads directly to students in the next class coming in a couple of minutes early to talk to me. They stay into lunch, they stay after school; some of them contact me outside of school hours. I frequently give extra time for tests, letting them run into the next day’s class; I have been known, even, to continue reading a novel even after the end of the semester when we started reading it.

I don’t tend to break my time up: I tend to blend it together.

This also represents my teaching style: because I think my primary purpose, as a higher-level literature teacher, is to connect things: I want to connect my students to other people, and to the feelings of other people as well as their own. I want them to recognize that historical events and epochs are connected to the lives of people, and also connected to the present, and to our own lives. I want them to see the web of relationships that spans all of our world, and all of our history. I want them to connect art to life, and life to art, themselves to the greatest authors of all time, who were, after all, only human, and were once themselves depressed and horny teenagers.

Nobody more so than William Shakespeare.

So then, when the motivational pedagogist told us that we should create this sort of temporal mind marker with EVERY SINGLE CLASS, so that EVERY SINGLE CLASS was an opportunity for a fresh start, for a clean slate, for a new beginning with new hope and new energy, a chance to CHANGE THE WORLD, I felt — well, a little sad. Obviously I was doing this wrong. Here I am, thinking of every class as connected to every other class, and wanting to get deeper into longer learning experiences, that bleed from day into day, from week into week, from month into month. I like that I have students for multiple years — though I also think they should get a chance to have different teachers, too; I did actually teach one student for all four years of high school, so that essentially everything that young person gained from high school ELA instruction was all from me, but I think that is definitely not the ideal. But I like connecting year to year, idea to idea. I think that’s much of what is missing in our culture and society — connection — and I want to promote it.

But that’s wrong, I guess.

I should be starting every new class fresh, completely discarding what happened in the past and looking only to the future. I guess.

I also thought: My god, how much energy do you have to have to infuse that much new optimism into EVERY SINGLE CLASS?? I work hard enough trying to keep my bad moods from bleeding into the next class, and to change from one specific topic into a new one for the new class; I’m not sure I can close my eyes, ball my fists, and think, “Okay, Dusty: here we go READY TO CHANGE THE WORLD AGAIN!”

But I should be doing that, I guess. Just like I should be at the door greeting every new student who comes into my room with their own special signature handshake, so they know that they are special and individual to me. (Though, for someone to be special to you, doesn’t that mean you have to build a relationship? And remember it, from one day to the next? Would it be better to discard the past every day and treat every day as a new chance to succeed?) I guess.

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Also, who is that person you’re sitting next to?

So then, after a brief break for a brain wake-up call (We played Rock-Paper-Scissors! With our non-dominant hand! Which was way better than just sitting quietly by myself for a few minutes!), the motivational pedagogist moved on to her next topic: direction. And destination.

Where before the center of the analogy had been milestone birthdays — her husband had just turned 50, and I bet you’ll NEVER GUESS what he did for his 50th birthday! (And if you guessed this, you were right!) — this time the metaphor was flying airplanes. And she talked about compass headings, and how if you were off even one degree, out of 360 degrees on the compass, it would, over time, take you quite far away from your destination — in fact, her example was of an airplane that was two degrees off on their heading, and they CRASHED INTO A MOUNTAIN.

SO OKAY.

THAT’S COMFORTABLE.

I’M FEELING GREAT RIGHT NOW.

And how did she analogize this back to teaching and education? Well you see, if you — or rather I, since I was the target here — I focus in my planning and curriculum design too much on what I am teaching, rather than on what students are learning — that’s a bad compass heading. It may be close, it may only be off by a couple of degrees — but over time, those few degrees’ worth of difference will — well, you know.

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Okay: so now, not only am I failing my students because I am not treating every single class like it’s New Year’s Eve and I only get one wish AND IT’S FOR YOU KIDS TO LEARN THIS SONNET!, but also, I am failing because, it’s true, I do often think first, “Okay, what am I doing next class/tomorrow/next week?” I do often think about what I am teaching, rather than what my students are learning.

And my failure? It’s right here:

Plane Crash Plane Crashing GIF - Plane Crash Plane Crashing Crashing Plane - Discover & Share GIFs

But here’s the thing.

I don’t buy this.

Not only do I not believe that starting fresh every single period is the best relationship to have with students, or the best perspective to have of school, or the best way to CHANGE THE WORLD; but I also don’t believe that student learning has to be the center — the course heading — for every single lesson I teach. I don’t believe, at all, that there is a single destination in education that can only be reached by adhering to a specific course heading. Partly that’s because I think of my lesson objectives in a similar way to how I think of classes ending and starting: I like to make connections. Or more precisely, I like the students to make connections. So there is never a single destination for me, it is always connected to other destinations — and since I want the students to do that part of the thinking, rather than having me prescribe exactly what connection they should make and what it should mean to them, I don’t think my lessons have only one possible (connected) destination.

For instance:

I teach this poem sometimes. Mostly as a joke, but also, because it has a useful point in it that I can make about poetry.

Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.

This is actually a poem titled “Reflections on Icebreaking,” by the comedic poet Ogden Nash, one of my favorite poets. When I teach this, most of my students connect it to Willy Wonka (Johnny Depp says it, too, in the remake), and they chortle and chuckle over the scandalous idea of their English teacher promoting drinking! Alcohol! The very idea!

We’ll leave out the facts about how steeped our society is in alcohol, and the fact that I teach high school students who have very little innocence left and certainly none about the existence of intoxicating beverages: and just look at the poem. It’s very short, obviously; Nash’s original only has four lines (Candy/Is Dandy/But liquor/Is quicker), but in those four lines, there are two rhymes, and one of them — liquor/quicker — is really quite clever.

But beyond that, between the title, which in this case provides vital information about the message of the poem, and the specific word choice that Nash gives us, there actually is an interesting point to be made by this poem. First, while my students always think the point is that liquor will get you wasted faster than candy will, I only have to challenge them once on whether or not they think of candy as a way to get wasted before they realize that probably isn’t what the poem is about. Then I focus them on the title, ask what ice breaking is (Most of them don’t really know, those sweet, sweet summer children), and get them to recognize that these are two ways to “break the ice,” to loosen up awkward social occasions. I ask them how candy can do this, and when it is used; they always think of Halloween parties and such, where candy is put out in dishes — but nobody thinks of the doctor’s office, where the child is given a lollipop to ameliorate the pain of the injection; or smokers who chew gum to alleviate their cravings for nicotine. There are countless places where candy is offered, or consumed, in order to help people relax: but Nash has, most likely, a specific social situation in mind, which we can tell because of the second ice breaker he names: liquor. Now, liquor is used to ease awkwardness and uncomfortable politeness in many situations, as well (Though hopefully not the doctor’s office); when I met my new boss this past summer, I made sure to go out with him for tacos and margaritas, even though I didn’t feel like being social, because I wanted him to get to know me better, because he’s my new boss. But there is only one social situation, traditionally, where both candy and liquor are frequently used to reduce awkwardness: it’s dating. For breaking the ice on a first date, a gift of candy is dandy — but liquor is quicker.

And that’s when I make what I think is the real point here: Nash does not say that liquor is better. He simply says it breaks the ice quicker. And it does: it lowers inhibitions, which obviously would reduce awkward tension. But because it does this fast, probably too fast, it can also lead to regret: which might be why your better choice would be candy. Which is dandy. Everybody likes candy.

So okay, that’s a lesson I teach. I think it shows the importance of specific word choice, and of important phrases like titles, and that every poem can have something genuine to say, even if it isn’t anything terribly deep.

So am I off target here?

Have I got the wrong compass heading? Will I miss my destination?

Am I headed for the mountainside?

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See, I don’t think so. I think there are, in truth, many possible destinations. If I can get a student to understand that poems have messages, that’s a victory — that’s a destination I want to reach, and which is worth reaching. If I can get a student to appreciate that poetry uses specific words to create specific meanings, that’s a destination worth reaching. If I can get a student to recognize that references in movies and TV shows can have much more depth and meaning than you would think, that’s a destination worth reaching. And if I can get a student to laugh, and enjoy either English class or poetry or both, just a little more, that’s the best destination of all.

So which course heading is that?

If I’m off by one or two degrees – will I miss my destination?

Do I need, as the pedagogical motivationist went on to say, a sharp focus on every tiny detail of the lesson, always keeping the destination in mind, because a mistake of only one degree would mean that I miss the destination and crash into the mountainside?

No. No to all of it. It’s not true, and in fact it is dangerous and damaging to what education should be.

The purpose of the metaphor, and of the pedavational motigogist in general, was to get us to focus on standards. On learning objectives. On SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound – because that’s how you aim at a specific target, and hit it every time: when the target is tiny, and close by, and simple to recognize, to name, to teach, and to assess whether or not it was hit. And when education focuses, as education so often does, on students reaching the standards, and nothing else, then sure, the only way to teach is to focus exclusively on those tiny little learning targets. And I guess taking your eyes off the next inch you need to crawl might make it harder to reach that target in a timely manner. 

But honestly: if you are flying a plane, shouldn’t you look a little higher up, a little farther out, than the next inch? You may want to keep the compass heading locked on specifically – but don’t you also want to watch the horizon? Don’t you want to keep an eye out for, I dunno, MOUNTAINS YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO CRASH INTO???

Wouldn’t it be a better metaphor to think of teaching and learning as flying a plane, and looking around, observing the situation around you, considering what might be a good place to land – gauging, judging, using experience to guide your assessment of the circumstances based on observations – and then bringing the plane in safely? Or flying wherever the hell you want to go, following your dreams to anywhere in the world they might lead you? Wouldn’t those be good ways to think of the school-plane we’re flying?

I think so. Though I guess it wouldn’t be proper pedamotive gogyvation.

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So here’s my new plan. I’ve thought for a long time that I would be an excellent inservice presenter. I’m good in front of a group of people, I speak well, I have a good sense of humor; and I think I know a fair amount about teaching, and could have some useful things to say to help make people improve as teachers and educators. 

But I would never get hired. Because no administration would want to buy my inservice program of “Let The Teachers Teach Whatever The Hell They Want To Because They Know Better Than You.” That system is not guaranteed to raise test scores, which is really the only reason why administrators bring in inservice presenters.

So this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to make the slickest presentation imaginable, about how I’m going to strip teachers of every shred they are clinging to of self-esteem or confidence, so that they will only do what they are told, and will never, ever, argue with their administrators ever again, no matter how inane or nonsensical are the programs and innovations those administrators come up with. And when I get hired to train a staff, I will get the administrators to leave me alone with the teachers – and then I will do nothing but praise those teachers, and honor them for the work they do and the dedication they put into it. I will thank them for everything they sacrifice to try to help their students. I will point out – because I think it’s important to remember – that students are the ones actually doing the work of learning, and that it is goddamn hard work; they deserve praise and honor as well, for every one of their victories large or small. I will help my audience of teachers see that the job of a teacher is to help students find the strength and the courage to keep working, even though the potential rewards of all of their very hard work are very far away and very abstract – and not always guaranteed, or even likely. I would encourage those teachers to talk to each other, and to their students, before they talk to any administrator, or any damn pedagogical expert, when looking for inspiration and guidance about how to create a new and better lesson for helping students get what they need. I would try to give the teachers the self-confidence to try new things, and to experiment, and to be honest with themselves and their students when they don’t know what the right answer is, or if the new thing they’re trying is the best thing: but they should try it anyway, and let students see them trying it, and thus encourage innovation and creativity and problem solving, along with honest reflection and assessment of one’s success. And I will tell those teachers to ignore every single test result, and every administrator who focuses on test results; and I will say that, if they do use standards, to remember that standards are only one small piece of a whole system of education, and they cannot ever be the most important one: because standards are not people. And education is people. Really, it is nothing but people.

And then, I will ask all of those teachers to go on Yelp or Google Reviews or whatever is the Google Pedagogy website (PedaGooglogy? We’ll workshop it.), and give me a five-star review, and lie and say that I helped them realize that they need to focus on nothing but standards in order to raise test scores, and they’ve never been so excited to do just that. 

And then I’ll use those reviews, and my slick sales pitch of a presentation, to go to another school, and do the same thing over again. 

Until I crash into the mountainside.