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This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, honestly, I’m thinking about how much I have to teach my students still, and how little time I have to do it. I’m thinking about whether or not literature can be parceled  into discrete packets called “reading assignments,” and whether there is any point to assigning reading homework to people who don’t read. I’m thinking about whether it’s better to comment extensively on essay drafts, or to hand them right back and just say, “Make it better.” Independence or guidance?

On the one hand I have the pedagogical establishment in this country, which wants me to differentiate and scaffold and make all learning student-centered, preferably student-generated project-based collaborative group multimedia discovery projects. I honestly have no idea how to do this, but I suspect it is both transient and unsustainable: that too much effort would go into planning and organizing the perfect project units, and in pre-teaching protocols for students to follow in generating their own discovery learning projects, and in trying to make the groups work fairly, particularly with low-interest students; and within five years, pedagogists will have discovered a new element that should be added — though nothing will ever be taken away. The new element will not make this more practical.

And on the other hand I have Eugen Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery Herrigel was a German philosophy professor who studied traditional Japanese archery in Japan, and his book is credited with helping to popularize Zen in the west. His archery master has the perfect system: he shows the students how to do the thing — how to draw the bow, aim, and fire at a target (Also, most importantly, how to breathe) — and then he has the students do it, and he points  out their mistakes. Then he does it again. And again. That’s it: modeling and expert critique. There is no explicit  instruction at all.

There is precisely one reason why I have to rush, why I have to assign reading packets rather than whole novels, or better yet, just read whole novels with my students and discuss them as we go, and it is time. The determination that one class lasts for fifty minutes, that one week is five classes, that one semester is eighteen weeks, that one year is two semesters, that an education is thirteen years. We are in a hurry, all the time, forever, particularly with our children. That’s what ruins everything.

If I could teach anything, I would teach this world to take its time.

Two Books by John Wyndham

Dusty 2 Comments

Image result for rebirth john wyndhamImage result for the secret people john wyndham

Two by John Wyndham: Re-Birth and The Secret People

I’ve gone up and down with John Wyndham. A couple of his books – The Midwich Cuckoos and Day of the Triffids – are outstanding; Chocky was just okay. Generally I like his storytelling, and his ideas are wonderful; but they can’t all be gems, no matter who the author is. No problem. Really, this fits in nicely to the Golden Age of Science Fiction, where Wyndham deserves a place, since even Heinlein and Asimov wrote some stinkers. I like Wyndham, though, and I like that I keep finding his books in cheap paperback editions from the 60’s and 70’s with interesting cover art. That cover art was what made me pick both of these.

So I had two of his novels to read, and once I read them, well – to be honest, my opinion of Wyndham went down. This has been mitigated now by the fact that one of these two, The Secret People, was one of his earliest works, written in 1935; my first book isn’t very good, either. But that’s not enough: because this book wasn’t just “not very good.” It’s a stack of crap in a cover.

We’ll start with the good one, though. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.) Re-Birth, from 1955, (Published in Wyndham’s native UK as The Chrysalids, which is a way better title but I assumed they changed it because the American public’s response was overwhelmingly, “Wut’s in tarnation’s a chrysalid?”) is a great book in two ways: it has a post-apocalyptic setting fully as interesting and disturbing as A Handmaid’s Tale, with the same kind of theocratic hypocrisy in full bloom. Told from the point of view of a young boy whose father is a pillar of the community, it has that excellent innocent perspective that makes social commentary novels genuinely effective, from The Giver to To Kill a Mockingbird. We learn how screwed up the society is as the protagonist does, and it works extremely well. There’s a nice twist, too: because we find out that the main character, David, is actually one of the forbidden people, one of the untouchables, as it were, but in a way that enables him to hide it. So we get the view of the society from both a child’s perspective and an outsider’s perspective, and it’s very well done.

The society is an agrarian theocracy after the world-shattering nuclear war; it is probably somewhere in Greenland, though that isn’t entirely clear. (That may be my poor grasp on world geography – or, honestly, it’s been a couple of months since I read it; I may just not remember.) The society has an absolute rule against genetic mutations, which are more common because of the radiation; anyone who is born with any kind of imperfection is essentially exposed to the elements. (Turns out they don’t always die, but that’s not for the society’s lack of trying.) David is a genetic mutation, but not with any physical alteration, and so he slips through the net, and eventually finds several others who are like him.

I don’t want to spoil it any more than that, because it is essentially worth reading. I didn’t really like the ending, though. We get two glimpses into other societies, one of the outcast genetic mutations who have survived on the fringes of the theocratic society, and one highly advanced society from another part of the world; and frankly, both suck. The book as a whole just made me dislike people. Which, I mean, that’s fair, but it’s not always the kind of book I want to read; I also felt that this one didn’t hold out any real hope for a better world or better people. I guess there’s a small chance that David and his friends are the hope, but they continue to be a part of the crappy societies, so I don’t really see it.

But I did like the characters a lot, and I thought the society and the central conflict over genetic “perfection,” with the underlying theme of questioning that very concept – what exactly is the “correct” genotype? Or more importantly, the correct phenotype? At what point does variation become too far from the “norm?” – all that was great. If you’re a Wyndham fan, go ahead and read this one.

Don’t read The Secret People. Not anyone, not for any reason – not even for that epically bizarre cover. Because the cover is a lie! There aren’t any weird dirt-people with mushroom horns! They’re just short! I wanted freaky gnomes and dwarves and stuff, but what I got was – crap. Racist crap.

So The Secret People, originally published in 1935, is a lot like an H. Rider Haggard novel, except Wyndham wasn’t as good a writer. And they both had crap ideas. This book starts with a couple of poorly explained technological advances to get us in the sci-fi mood; the main character is an international playboy with his own jet plane – and I mean, it’s a rocket ship with a cabin and everything, that flies in atmosphere – and at one point, he picks up his newest Bond Girl and flies over the inland sea that is being made where the Sahara used to be. Sadly, they crash into the water, and through a series of mishaps, they find themselves in an underground world peopled by strange beings! Living under the Sahara! SO WEIRD!

Except they’re not. They’re Pygmies, from Africa, who apparently wandered into underground caves centuries ago, and just kept wandering. And just like Haggard, who had a serious case of TheWhiteManIsTheRightMan-itis, Wyndham describes these “secret people” as essentially savages who have been unable to advance their civilization in any way past their original stone-tool-and-superstition society. The modern Eurotrash heroes get chucked into a prison cavern with all the other surface dwellers who have found their way underground now that the inland-sea-over-the-Sahara project has compromised the Secret People’s secrecy, and then they have to find their way out and back to the jet plane, which is their only hope of surviving. Because, you see, the inland sea has started leaking into this vast underground cavern world, and the whole place is going to drown.

But that doesn’t matter! What matters is who gets to the plane first: the heroes, our playboy and his Bond Girl, or the sinister criminal element, who were already in the cavern when our heroes arrive, and who are both rapey and swarthy – an unforgivable combination. But that’s okay, because they’re also stupid and cowardly and everything else you would expect from a swarthy criminal type, and so yes, our heroes are the ones who make it out alive before all of the Secret People drown. Which, y’know, is a happy ending.

Terrible book. Don’t read it. Go for Re-Birth/The Chrysalids – or even better, read The Midwich Cuckoos.

This Post Is Covered With Shit. But Not Full of It.

Dusty 3 Comments

There are a lot of ways to look at education.

You can see education as a means for students to practice and perfect skills: writing skills, reading skills, math skills, science skills. Incremental improvement in ability over time, largely through careful, guided practice. The steady honing of a functional tool, which will then be slotted into its proper space in the Machine.

You can see education as a place for children to explore: to learn what is out there in the world, and what connections they can make to it, and to each other, and to themselves. School is a big pot of fun ‘n’ friends; the Best Time Of Their Lives.

You can see education as the passing on of a torch, the filling of a vessel with the golden ambrosia of knowledge — or maybe the cooking of a roast. New people come to the school, and they are unburnt, or empty, or raw; and we light them, fill them, roast them, and then they are — like us. Members of a culture and an intellectual tradition, with an awareness of what that means and how they can pass the fire/water/ uh . . . heat? What does cooked meat pass? Calories? A delicious aroma? Whatever, they can pass it on to the next generation.

Or you can see education the way my students do: as the longest, most agonizing obstacle course they have ever faced, filled with everything bad — pain, fear, sorrow, impotent anger, self-loathing, failure, futility, and wedgies — going on for years and years and years, draining every drop of life from them, only to spit them out the end: where they become, most likely, new obstacles on the course for the next batch of runners.

Or you can see education the way I do, the way most teachers do: it’s a job. Better than some, worse than others. Probably not worth what we put into it.

That’s not all it is, though. And I don’t doubt that most people see education as a combination of those things, and maybe a few others — I know there are certainly those who see it as indoctrination; at my last school, in a small rural town in Oregon, I know school was seen by many as the best source for husbands and wives, for fathers and mothers of the next generation, which they saw no reason to wait to produce. There was a daycare in the school building for the children of students. Also the children of teachers and a few children from the general populace, but still: that daycare housed a whole lot of, let’s call them extracurriculars.

However we see education, though — and I don’t think we all need to agree about what it is and what it should be; I think an ongoing debate about education is probably a healthy tension — the one thing we should all agree on is this: it is important. Maybe not school, maybe not for everyone or in every way; but education is a part of how our race survives: because humans are born useless and pathetic. Giraffes and horses and moosen can stand mere minutes after being born, and run not long after that; we can’t even put on our own pants for years. Humans without education are dead. Period. So if we matter, then education matters.

And it takes the same thing to make us matter that it takes to make education matter. That thing is substance. There has to be something inside us, something behind the mask, something that makes us move, that makes us act. Something that tells me the words to say next.  Some people are driven by their emotions and passions; some people are driven by their reason; and some people are driven by the desires of something larger than themselves, even if it is larger only in their own minds. That thing could be a religion, or a nation, or a father, or just society’s approval in general; whatever it is, those people take their cue from someone outside themselves, and that is what drives them: they live to please and honor that larger thing. And I don’t mean to denigrate that type of substance, especially not when it is so clearly part of my own motivation. I want to live up to the example of those who came before. I want to please my readers. I want to win awards. And I want to experience and honor my passions, and I want to follow the course set down by my reason. All at once. All mixed up.

Nothing’s ever simple, is it?

(That’s why we need education.)

My strongest motivation is this: I want to make my wife proud. I want to make her happy. I want to take away all of her regrets, and all of her fears, and all of her frustrations; I want to give her a perfect launching pad for her own life, for her own dreams, her own motivations; I want to be the support for her substance. I mean, I want my own substance, too; but I want her to have hers, first. Because she’s better than me. And I am not at all ashamed to say that: I am proud that I am the one she chose, and I am proud that I can work to give her her chance.

And I am furious that she has to deal with bullshit instead of flying free and doing what she wants, what she is capable of. It drives me crazy that she has to claw her way out of the muck of this cesspool of a world before she can become herself. It’s like a giant, sticky, neverending cocoon made of petrified bullshit: and people like my wife, people who are and always have been butterflies, have to kill themselves getting out of it. Goddamn it.

But what this all comes down is substance. I know, I know, I haven’t defined it well. I got onto a rant-tangent — a rangent, if you will (Or tangerant?) — because I am angry about my wife’s fight against bullshit. But let me try to get back to my point. I started with education because that’s what I know best, but it could as easily be politics, or commerce, or family, and the issue would be the same: to be worthwhile, to be something that actually does for humanity what it is supposed to do, the thing must have substance.

For a family to have substance, the family members have to actually do and feel and think the way a family is supposed to, fulfilling the role that family is to fill: they have to love and support one another. There has to be genuine connections between the family members, and all involved have to honor and maintain those connections. When a family has that real bond, then it improves the lives of the members of the family; it gives them shelter in the shit-storm (A veritable shit-climate, in fact), and a way to climb up out of the muck, to break free of their cocoons. (Can I call them poop-cocoons without losing the thread here? It’s just — it’s calling to me. Poop-cocoons. I can’t help it. Sorry.) Because there is something real there, it lends real mass, real energy, real velocity, to the constituent parts; their substance has something to back it up, to drive it, and so they can have real substance.

Am I making sense here? I feel like there’s a genuinely important thing underlying this, and I fear that I’m losing it. Let me keep trying.

When politics works well, then it creates an opportunity for the citizens of the political entity — call it a country for simplicity’s sake — to be something they could not be if they lived in a place where their politics did not work well. Because this country has, through much of its history, had politics that worked well, we have been able to do extraordinary things, to be extraordinary things. Not all of us, for a lot of reasons; but we have been extraordinary. We were the first to fly, and the first to touch the moon; we cured polio; we split the atom; we created the blues, and jazz, and rock and roll, and hip-hop. George Carlin was an American. Those things came out of this nation because the nation’s political structure had substance. It was driven by serious people working for serious reasons (whether those reasons for a particular person were emotional, logical, or ethical), and taking their jobs seriously. They didn’t just live up to the appearance of their role, the mere surface; they went deep inside. And I know that because look at what happened: it worked. We created substance, which only comes from substance. Something doesn’t come from nothing.

Nothing can come from something, though. Sadly. We can come from substance, from something real, and we can turn it into a joke. And there are as many reasons for that as there are for people to live with substance, but they all have one trait in common: they are shallow. Greed, for instance, if we can turn to commerce. When someone runs a business with substance, when they recognize their role in providing goods or services to customers, and earning a fair profit in return, then great things happen: Hollywood movies and Apple computers and Ford motors. But when people seek only profit, and they recognize that creating the appearance of substance is cheaper than actually creating substance — but if the facade is good enough to fool the customers, then they can charge the same as companies that have substance — then you get reality TV, and Goldman-Sachs, and Wal-Mart. Driven only by greed, they create only hollow hills, which collapse under their own weight when we try to climb them. They don’t get us out of the shit: they bury us in more of it. A neverending shit-storm.

When education has substance, no matter what is taught, no matter how fast students learn it or how many students learn it or how much exactly they learn — they learn. When education has substance, students come out of it changed, and improved, even if indirectly. Education with substance comes, only and always, from educators with substance. They don’t have to be teachers, of course, and most of the time, probably, they are not; I’d say the most common educators with substance are parents, followed by best friends. They teach us and they make us better. They use their substance to give us substance.

I do think the majority of teachers bring substance to their work. It’s hard not to, because it’s hard to miss the importance of the job — as I said, without education, there are no people; that’s a heavy weight, which I’m glad we don’t bear alone: but we hold some of it. When we have substance, we teachers, we can hold up a fair amount of that weight. Raise it up out of the shit.

And the worst thing in the goddamn world for teachers is when we are trying to maintain our substance — using up our own personal substance to do it — and we are forced to spend our time and energy instead on surface bullshit. On forms and paperwork that cover the asses of administrators, that stroke the egos of spoiled parents, that allow shallow, empty politicians to get elected one more time by people who don’t really know what the fuck they’re doing in the voting booth.

What precipitated this rant? A lot, actually; a lot of shit. But the clearest trigger was this last weekend, this three-day weekend, a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday (A man of substance, to be sure), which my wife and I spent a large portion of shoveling shit. Not building a structure of substance for our students, or even better, ourselves, to stand on and reach out of the shit; no no no — we were throwing shit. We were working on a syllabus for an Advanced Placement class, because we both teach AP courses at the high school where we work, me AP Literature and AP Language, she AP Art. When you teach an AP class, to be allowed to use the official AP designation, you have to turn a syllabus into the College Board, which runs the AP program (Also the SAT.).

Those syllabuses are bullshit.

The requirements for what has to be included on the syllabus are so entirely unrealistic that I doubt that a single one — not one of the thousands upon thousands of AP courses out there who have gone through this — really represents what happens in the actual class. I know mine certainly don’t reflect reality, not for either of my classes. If I taught to an empty room, I couldn’t cover all of that material, not in the kind of depth that is needed. See, the purpose of an AP class is to earn college credit while still in high school; that’s why my students take it, at least. Well, that’s the surface reason. The real reason is because these classes are challenging, and they give students a better understanding of and ability in the subject. They are classes with substance. I know both of mine are. I go into those classes with everything I have: with my experience, and my expertise, and more preparation and organization than I have ever brought to my regular classes — and I’m a good teacher in a regular class. For the AP classes, I’m better. And my students respond: I watch them grow and improve, and for the most part, I see them succeed. Some of them don’t, but that’s because they don’t bring their substance to the class; they take the class because their friends are in it, or they think I am cool (I am — but only on the surface) and they wanted to take a class, any class, with me; or they didn’t really think about how hard it would be. Or they were put in the class without any input of their own. You know: surface reasons. Bullshit reasons. Those students don’t succeed, necessarily. But the ones who come with real motivation, who do real work for real reasons? They get better. They grow. They become educated. I give them a platform to stand on — which I bust my ass building and maintaining — and they climb up out of the shit. Sometimes they even fly away.

None of that is on my syllabus. Largely because substance takes time and focus, and so you can’t cover a whole lot of ground — it’s dense. Concentrated. Has to be. But the AP syllabus has to cover, for literature, all of Western literature from 1500 to the present day: poetry and drama and prose, both short form and novels. All of it. They have to know what a sonnet is, and how William Shakespeare’s differ from ee cummings’s. They have to know both the traditional canon of dead white men, and they have to be familiar with the contributions to Western literature that have come from non-whites, and from the non-dead, and from non-men (Also called women.). They have to be able to read deeply, and analyze correctly, and write eloquently, and do all of it in 40 minutes.

And I have to spend my weekend correcting a syllabus. To make sure that it covers every one of the required learning components, that it has sufficient evidence to show that it covers every learning component, and that the evidence is in the form the AP auditors prefer. And their feedback looks like this:

Component (Which I’m making up, but isn’t far from the truth) #28: The course shows students the wide range of literary techniques from Guadalajara, Mexico, as represented by the many poets and playwrights who have hailed from that locale over the last four centuries.

Evaluation guideline: The syllabus must include the wide range of literary techniques from Guadalajara, Mexico, as represented by the many poets and playwrights who have hailed from that locale over the last four centuries.

Rating: Insufficient evidence

Rationale: The syllabus must list specific literary techniques used in specific titles of specific types (prose, poetry, and drama) by specific authors. The literary techniques, titles, and authors must be specifically connected to specific activities that show specific criteria for student mastery of the wide range of Guadalajaran literature.

Please examine our sample syllabi, or contact a Curriculum Specialist for personalized feedback, though be aware that this latter course will take weeks and weeks and run you right past the deadline for when this syllabus has to be approved for this school year.

So we got this for the syllabus we were working on, right? And we added in “The course shows students the wide range of literary techniques from Guadalajara, Mexico, as represented by the many poets and playwrights who have hailed from that locale over the last four centuries.”
It’s a lie, because I don’t consider Guadalajaran literature important enough to cover to the depth demanded by the component; instead, I teach the same wide range of literary techniques with, say, Oaxacan literature, which I spend two months on in my class. We add this lie to the syllabus — no substance there, just a surface checkmark to please someone looking only at the surface — and send it in. And get it back. Rejected again. With the exact same feedback.

So we add more evidence. We list out those literary techniques, and we list those Guadalajaran authors, and the Oaxacan ones just for good measure, and then we throw in three or four haiku-writers from Tenochtitlan, just in case. We describe the multiple essays, treatises, and book-length theses the students are going to have to write on each and every one of these elements. And then we send that pile of sloppy, gooey bullshit in.

Approved.

And that’s the end of it. The College Board doesn’t follow up on this. They don’t come and watch the class. They don’t come and ask the students what they have learned — don’t even correlate test results with specific syllabi, and ask teachers to look for areas for improvement; none of that. They don’t survey students or parents or teachers. They don’t ask us to send in work samples, or example lesson plans. All they want is the syllabus. Which they want to say very, very specific things, but which they don’t write for us; they just keep telling us we’re writing it wrong until we get it right. Which is when it’s all bullshit. Which fact they have to know: there’s no way they couldn’t. Not when every one of those thousands and thousands of syllabi are nothing but bullshit.

Here’s the kicker: once the syllabus is approved, it never has to be resubmitted. It just gets re-approved, every year, automatically. Even though my class, like pretty much every class of substance, changes substantially from year to year. Doesn’t matter.  In fact, if the course had a syllabus at the same school with a previous teacher, the College Board encourages the teacher to simply copy and “update” the old syllabus.

It’s all bullshit. I have no doubt that the intent is twofold: to prevent lawsuits from students who fail the AP exam — “I’m sorry your daughter got a -6 on the test, Mr. Svenswinderssonsen, but the syllabus on file from her school clearly states that she was taught all of the Guadalajaran literary techniques.” — and to present the AP program as being extremely rigorous. Is it actually rigorous? Not through any fault of the College Board. And not as it is purported to be on those syllabi. Which took hours and headaches to get right. So that everybody can now ignore them until the end of time.

This turned into a much larger piece than I intended it to be. But I’m feeling pretty deep in the bullshit right now, and it takes a lot of shoveling to get out. Because this isn’t just an AP issue: this is all of school. Everything I do that isn’t actually teaching is related to the same sort of thing: I give bullshit tests to show bullshit data about bullshit growth so the administrators can tell the school board and the politicians that the school has the surface appearance of actual substance. I fill out forms for students who get IEPs for exactly one reason: to avoid lawsuits. To maintain a reputation. To create an appearance of rigor and value and substance. And every hour I spend on that bullshit is one less hour I have to provide actual substance to my actual students.

We’re burying ourselves in bullshit, and ruining the one thing that we actually need, just because — we’re looking at the surface, only at the surface. Not at the substance — or lack thereof — underneath it.

Maybe in this mixed-metaphor ramble, I have uncovered something of substance for you to stand on. Maybe you can make a little more progress on getting out of your poop-cocoon. I hope so, I really do. Some of us have to become butterflies. Some of us have to take to our wings and fly. All of this shit-shoveling has to lead to something good. Something extraordinary.

I’m just afraid that the most extraordinary people are exactly the ones neck-deep and shoveling, and the ones climbing out aren’t butterflies in poop-cocoons: they’re just giant bags of shit. Standing above us, and looking down.

Happy Inauguration Day.

“Teachers” Teaching Teachers

Dusty Leave a comment

The trouble with education in America today is this: the teachers that are teaching teachers how to teach can’t teach.

I have a friend who is going through teacher training right now. (My friend has requested anonymity, and so I am going to leave out everything including gender.) I have been a teacher for a long time, and I know this friend very well, and here’s the truth: my friend is going to be an excellent teacher. My friend knows the subject matter, knows how to deal with teenagers – the intent is to teach at the high school level. Most importantly, my friend, like me, had a tumultuous personal experience in high school, and has been both a good student and a crappy student, both a model citizen and a juvenile delinquent; my friend will be able to speak with students, relate to students, understand students. My friend will teach students, and for some of those students, my friend will be their favorite teacher, the one they remember for years afterwards. Though they won’t come back to visit, just like they don’t come back to visit me. It’s okay – they don’t come back because most of the students who really bond with me do so because they are having a spectacularly miserable high school experience, the kind that beat poems and punk rock songs are written about. And if they came back to visit me, they’d have to relive what I hope was the worst time in their lives – and what I hope I helped them through. I don’t need to shake their hand to know they needed me to be who I am.

My friend will be the same. I know it. I try to be convincing and confident when we talk about the future teaching career, but my friend is also humble enough to have doubts, doubts that have taken me fifteen years to dispel, doubts I haven’t completely dispelled even now. It’s okay. Doubt combined with ideals makes us try to improve. It’s a useful tension.

You know what’s not a useful tension? Having a class that is half the duration of the usual college level course, and going almost half of it without getting any feedback from the professor. No grades, no comments, nothing for three and a half weeks, which covered ten graded assignments. No grades on any of them. That is not useful tension: that is a teacher not doing her job. And it drives me nuts, hearing about this, because I’m a slow grader, for two legitimate reasons: I don’t assign my students busy work during class, which means I never get to get grading done while my students are working on their new worksheet (Yeah, math teachers, I’m looking at you, you lazy punks); and two, I read everything my students write, and I try to give substantive feedback on everything I can. So it takes me a while. Except for two times during the year: the end of the semester, when I have to kill myself getting the grades in on time, and the beginning of the year, when I realize that my students are not familiar with what I want from them, what I am like as a grader, what is really important to me. They need to get a grade and feedback from me before they can feel comfortable doing assignments for me. So I try to grade the first serious assignment as quickly and thoroughly as I can – generally I can pound it out in a weekend, though I tell them it will never happen that quickly again. From that assignment, they learn the following: I don’t really care much about deadlines. Don’t care much about spelling, unless it is a formal essay. I don’t care at all about format, font, handwritten-versus-CG, or those little frilly edges that come from ripping pages out of a notebook. I care about what they think and how well they can express it to me. That’s what their grades are based on: and I make sure they know that before they have to turn in their second assignment.

My friend’s classes are all online. Which means there is no lecture, and there is no class prep; the teacher’s only job is to grade the work and monitor discussions. And yet the teacher – who had in her instructions dire warnings against even the thought of turning work in late – took three and a half weeks to return the first grades.

That’s not all: not by a long shot. The assignments come fast and furious: every week, the students in these classes – all of whom have degrees already, and so most of whom are already working, some full-time – need to read at least two chapters from the text, post a discussion topic that is thoughtful and thought-provoking and that cites sources; respond to at least four others students’ posts or responses to posts; and read at least 75% of the posts and replies in the discussion forums. For extra fun, the other students, eager little gold-star-seeking chipmunks that they are, try to post on every single topic and reply to every single response, sometimes at 11:00pm on the due date. And the more responses there are, the more each student has to read in order to hit the 75% of responses read mark. Thanks, guys. Way to throw your classmates under the bus in order to suck up. (But I also have to say: how American.) And each week culminates in a quiz, an essay, or a PowerPoint presentation on the week’s topic. Times two classes, times eight weeks. And even though both classes have large final projects due in the last week, which are weighted more heavily in the final grade, the discussions and responses and reading are still assigned for that last week. Nothing like giving people large projects and not giving them time to get them done!

The grades – now that my friend has gotten some (To be fair: in the other of the two classes my friend is currently taking, the professor, a former high school English teacher, responded within a week with the first set of grades, with reasonable comments. It’s only one of the two professors who can’t keep up with her own class’s pace.) – are sort of based on the content; but every assignment, my friend has lost some points not because of what the essay or presentation said – but rather because of the formatting of PowerPoint slides, or, more commonly, the lack of correct APA (That’s the American Psychological Association. Why are we using their format? Who knows?) citation formatting. This despite both professors letting some elements of APA formatting slide – the APA says, for instance, that every paper must have a title page and an abstract; neither professor has required that. But God forbid you fail to use hanging indents on your references page!!!

The textbooks are absurdly poorly written: they drag on and on and on, repeating the same information in a slightly different format, with ridiculous and unrealistic examples that don’t actually illustrate the concepts. For example, one chapter, on constructivist cognitive theory, explained the need for self-directed learners thusly: because change occurs rapidly, and certain innovations – like smartphones and green energy – have a large impact on society, it is vital that our students learn to become problem solvers. Now I agree that it is important that students become problem solvers, but the reason is because there are quite a number of problems that need solving, and the solutions will need to come from new minds that understand the problems and the possible solutions in new ways; traditional methods will not be effective. And the speed of change in society has precisely fuck-all to do with that. Thanks for the explanation, Mr. Textbook Guy. (Note: that is not a correctly formatted APA citation.)

The essays have minimum and maximum page assignments; this is common practice, I know, but as with every essay that has ever been assigned with a length requirement, the students focus first on the length, and only afterwards on the content. This aids in both creative editing and bombastic word-fluffing; not in learning content.

The short, informal discussion topics are worth 30 points and the essays are worth 35 points. That would be fine, except the essays are far more difficult and take at least three times as long to complete. For five more points. Way to prioritize. And here’s the best part: if you don’t earn a B on the final project, you cannot pass the class. That’s right: you can bust ass for seven weeks, run at 100% over 20 or so assignments; get a C on the final project – and fail the class. Really makes all that earlier effort seem worthwhile.

The quizzes, which are multiple choice and allow for multiple correct responses on one question, draw from different chapters that give different answers to the question, and require contradicting responses both marked as correct responses (I.e., the question was something like “Which are elements of how students learn?” and the responses had both “Through information processing” and “Through behavioral training,” which are opposing theories of learning – and both were correct answers.).


Here’s my point, in case I’m being unclear. Every single thing I’ve described here is terrible teaching practice. Good teachers build personal relationships with their students: these teachers are only online, and only contact their students indirectly, late, and in the vaguest possible terms. (And one of them uses Comic Sans. In multiple colors. With large amounts of capital letters and exclamation points. Reading her e-mails is like looking at Doge memes. But without the cute dog in the middle.) Content assessment should evaluate mastery of content, above all else if not to the exclusion of all else. Focusing on the minutiae like deadlines and formatting ruins the actual instruction of content. It’s fine to teach study habits that way, but not actual subject matter. Tests should never be tricky or obtuse, and the content resources should be clear and easy to understand, no matter how complex the subject – in fact, the more complex the subject, the easier the text should be to read.

And these are the people who are teaching new teachers how to teach.

My only hope is that the people in the class, including my friend, will learn nothing from these people. The last thing we need is a bunch of new teachers who don’t talk to their students, who give warnings but not grades, who give their students failing grades because they didn’t use one-inch margins and twelve-point font, and fail to help their students learn what they actually need to know.

Martin Luther King said that we have an obligation to disobey unjust and immoral laws. I would like to add that we have an obligation to ignore teachers who model bad teaching.

No Sale

Dusty Leave a comment

This week started with professional development: an inservice for the teachers in my charter district, designed to help us improve our ability to teach students by using assessment results (read: “test scores”) to inform our instruction – data-driven instruction was the eduspeak buzzterm used.

But though we teachers made up the majority of the audience, we weren’t actually the target demographic. You could tell from the handouts, and the PowerPoint presentation. Because one of the slides looked like this:

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Now, I’m generally pretty forgiving about typos, honestly. I’ve been a writer for a long time, and I have made my share of mistakes; I like to think that those mistakes do not represent my intelligence nor my writing ability, and I like to think that my audience doesn’t think less of me for them. In pursuit of that ideal, I try not to freak out about other people’s mistakes.

But come on. Tranining? When you’re going to present to a room full of teachers? Who are, generally speaking, the nitpickiest, judgmentalest, eye-rollingest crowd (Other than our students, of course.) that you will ever speak in front of? And to make matters worse, that wasn’t the only typo. Names used in examples changed – Courtney became Cortney, Redick became Riddick. (And because teachers are never allowed to make the filthy jokes that come to our minds as often as anyone else’s – you wouldn’t believe how hard it is for me to hold back the “Yo mama” type responses that constantly flash through my brain while I am talking to my students, not to mention the That’s what she said cracks I think up all the time – the name Redick, pronounced Re-Dick, was the source of many suppressed giggles at my table. Yeah, that’s right – we’re goddamn professionals. Just like your mom.), and Buddy left to find a new “hoe.” (Also the source of some giggles.) Most bothersome for me personally was this first question about Macbeth:

Fruitless, indeed.

Fruitless, indeed.

You’d think it was all the typos in the quotation, wouldn’t you? Nope. (But also, yup.) See, the four options given in our handout for the first question there – “What does it mean that Macbeth has a ‘fruitless crown’?” – were something like A) He will be an unsuccessful ruler, B) He will die soon, C) The country will not thrive under him, D) He will not have the crown for long. My problem? NONE OF THOSE OPTIONS IS THE CORRECT ANSWER. The “fruitless crown” is a reference to Macbeth’s vision, which predicts that his children (“No sin of mine” in a lovely Freudian slip that I wish Macbeth actually used) will not follow him on the throne, that the crown will revert to Banquo’s descendants, and go down through Banquo’s line (Which, supposedly, Shakespeare included as a bit of flattery for the new king, James I, who was descended from the historical Banquo and would have enjoyed seeing his family revealed as the legitimate rulers of Scotland) rather than Macbeth’s line. That’s why his crown will be “fruitless,” because he will have no fruit – you know, “Be fruitful and multiply,” which is from some famous book or other – to pass the crown on to. And though I know this because I know the play, it is also pretty damned apparent from the quotation they used in the question itself – though apparently, not apparent enough to the two dudes who came to teach all the English teachers how to teach English, and the math teachers how to teach math.

But you see, this failure to prepare their presentation in such a way that it might actually please teachers – it didn’t matter. Because while we were the bulk of the audience, we were not the actual target demographic.

Because teachers aren’t in charge of the money. We can’t order repeat presentations, or follow-up conferences; we can’t order books or computer programs or mailing lists produced by those yutzes who couldn’t even spell “training” or format fractions correctly (One of the other questions featured two answers that looked like this: 512/3. Because they couldn’t make their program say 51⅔. Which took me about a minute and a half to figure out, even though I’ve never done it before.). Administrators do that. Administrators control the purse strings at schools, and so this presentation, like most that I have seen, was largely a sales pitch aimed at administrators.

And it hit the mark. After the presentation Monday, the teachers at my school will be setting aside some of our planning time in order to implement the proposals outlined in the sales pitch – which also included a rather transparent statement to the effect that a school that wants to foster this culture of data-driven instruction needs to do it over a long period of time, and will need guidance of some sort (“LIKE MAYBE TWO GUYS WHO MAKE A LIVING OFF OF THIS IDEA, AND WHO ARE AVAILABLE AS CONSULTANTS” screamed the subtext). We will also have a new committee to suggest protocols so that can let the data drive our instruction more readily. The committee idea is amusing (and exasperating) particularly because my admin’s proposed name for it, the “Good to Great” committee, came from Monday’s presentation – but it came from the “case study” that was used to start the discussion, in which a principal tried to implement a data-driven culture, and did it wrong. Did everything wrong. Failed to get the teachers to agree, had to use threats to force the issue, didn’t actually use the suggestions from those few teachers who were involved, did most of the work herself, and got mediocre results because of all this. Apparently my admin saw this as inspiring, and so we will be emulating – that. Though not the part where she paid her teachers to create curriculum over the summer, instead of taking away some of their work time during the school year. I intend to imitate the teacher in that case study who complained about putting test prep into her curriculum in place of her “friendship unit.” Because I can’t give up my Friendship Unit. (That’s what she said.) The committee is also amusing (and exasperating) because on Wednesday, my admin, when proposing the committee, asked for volunteers; by Friday there had been only one volunteer. So the request was repeated. I can’t believe the administration thinks that teachers will volunteer for a committee like this. I really can’t believe that one of us actually did.

My point with all of this is that marketing and sales is a very different kettle of fish from education. Salesmen tailor their pitch towards their one specific goal – sales. Everything serves that, and anything that doesn’t serve that is wasted effort. So time spent on correcting your typos and bad answer-options is wasted time: because correct grammar doesn’t sell presentations. Catchy slogans and fun graphics sell presentations. Clips from the Brad Pitt movie Moneyball, in which a single hardass administrator – played by Brad Pitt, whom some people also find to be attractive – saves a poor and poorly run organization simply through the strength and clarity of his vision: those sell presentations. These guys sold presentations, and the system that goes with them. They made their quota.

Education, on the other hand, has as its goal the improvement of the entire society, and all of the people in it. We can argue about what would best do that – I’d argue that it would be lots of books and reading, where other people might think computers had a role (Probably it’s both) – but that is the goal: improvement of society as a whole. Because of that, educators strive to reach their entire audience. I don’t agree with the actual proposals in the No Child Left Behind law, but it’s hard to argue with the name, or the moral that name represents. Education is the clearest path to equality and equal opportunity for all people; it is the great leveler of an unbalanced society. Though I don’t believe that all of my students learn everything I teach, my goal is always to teach every single one of them as much as I possibly can. This is why education goes on for so many years, and has so many different forms and systems: because that is the best way to reach the maximum number of people with the maximum amount of information. Sales pitches are short and simple, and repeated ad nauseam: because you don’t need to reach every person listening. You just need to reach enough to sell your product. You just need to reach your target audience. That’s it.

And yet despite these fundamental differences, somehow the consumer model has crept into educational philosophy over the last thirty years or so. Now we seem to be under the impression that our schools are commercial endeavors: that we are selling a product, rather than providing a service necessary to the proper functioning of our society, and therefore our goal should be to please our customers – rather than to do what is best for everyone. This detracts from the effectiveness of education, because it leads to resources going to make schools more shiny, rather than more effective: we buy new computers rather than new books, and new sports equipment rather than lab equipment; because those are the things that impress our customers. We listen to complaints from our customers, and adjust our practices to please them, rather than doing what is most likely to achieve our goals and improve our society. And so when someone objects to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we remove the book from our curriculum. Not because the book harms our society: simply because our clients don’t like it. We are reaching the point now where books are vanishing entirely from the curriculum: because our students find them too long and boring and hard to focus on; and therefore they are removed. Because anything that doesn’t help sell the product is wasted effort.

But education is not sales. What is the product we are selling, exactly? It isn’t education. Is it attendance? Conformity? Diplomas? Great expanses of time reduced to pleasant emptiness, without effort, without stress? What?

Just as important: who are we selling it to? This is a question that I don’t think anyone has a definite answer for. Sometimes schools cater to the desires of students – my school has a dress code, for example, which three years ago was extremely strict: uniform polo shirts in school colors, khaki pants or skirts, and black shoes. That was all that was allowed. Now, students are still required to wear a uniform shirt – but they may also wear shirts that come from an extracurricular program connected to the school, so if a club or a sports team makes t-shirts for its members, that t-shirt becomes acceptable under the dress code. And now students can wear jackets over their shirts, as well, and shorts, and black pants of any style, and blue jeans, and any shoes they wish. And they get free dress days as rewards for good behavior, and for high test scores, and for good grades, and on their birthdays. The dress code has grown so relaxed simply because the students don’t like it, and fight against it, and the school doesn’t want to fight them.

After all, they’re our customers. Right?

But they’re not: because the students don’t make the decision about where they go to school. Their parents do. And so the school bends over backwards to please the parents. Teachers are expected to make time to meet with parents regardless of what else we have to do. Any dispute – over grades, over policies – is inevitably decided in favor of the parents. We had one parent complain about the weight of a child’s bookbag, and now all teachers are required to list and coordinate with each other the materials and supplies they ask students to carry, so they don’t have to carry too much weight. We had one parent complain about too many big projects being due at the same time, and now we have to coordinate our schedules with each other so that we stagger our due dates. Doesn’t matter that teachers complained – several teachers, several times, in both instances – that these things are a waste of time, that any student who has a problem with too much weight or too many projects due at once could come talk to a teacher individually and have the problem immediately solved; the parent complaints made the decision. Because they’re the customers.

I would argue that the reason for the push towards greater accountability and readily interpreted data – test scores and letter grades, rather than the old style report cards that described one’s “social skills” as “satisfactory” – is largely so that parents can decide if this school is a “good” one for their children to attend. My school, because it is part of a charter program, represents one of several options that parents in the area can choose; so we have open houses that try to draw new students to attend our school. At those open houses, we talk about the school’s past performance in easily digestible chunks: these are the test scores of our students; this is the total dollar value of the scholarships won by our students; this is the percentage of our students who go on to higher education (in these readily-marketable areas). But we don’t talk about what students actually study, what they learn, what they do. The parents do not meet and get to know the teachers, see if we are competent, see if we are personable. That would be wasted time and wasted effort: affable, erudite teachers don’t sell schools. Test scores do. And the various promises of constant and detailed communication, about every facet of school, to parents: we have all of our assignments online, and all of our teachers available through e-mail, and an auto-dialer that calls all of the parents with any school news (Remember when we used to get up early and watch the news to see if there was a snow day? Not any more.), and an online database of behavior that sends parents e-mails whenever their child is punished or rewarded, by any teacher, for any reason. Those sell the school, because parents want to know how their child is doing; and so those are the priority. But nobody asks how long I’ve been teaching, or how much education I have, what experience, what knowledge. Nobody cares. That doesn’t sell the school to the parents, and so it doesn’t matter. Thus, my performance evaluation is largely based on the test scores earned by my students. And also on the results of a survey given to parents and students about how much they enjoy my class, and how well I communicate with parents.

Oh yes – and the open houses feature a PowerPoint presentation. With many slogans and graphics. No clip from Moneyball, though. We should work on that.

When the goal of the organization becomes sales, then inevitably, the resources are dedicated to identifying what will sell and who will buy, and then providing that product to that consumer. Everything else falls away. Capitalist endeavors have only one purpose, no matter how our politicians crow about capitalism being the engine of innovation and the key to a perfect society: that one purpose is profit. Maybe Bill Gates uses his profits to benefit society; but that isn’t why he built and ran Microsoft.

Education is not a product. Students are not consumers nor customers of education; nor are parents; nor is society. Education builds society, it is not consumed by anyone. Teachers are not salespeople. Schools cannot be effectively run like a business. The presentation I saw on Monday is the antithesis of good education: there was nothing in it that could benefit anyone other than the two guys who were selling it and hoping to make money from it; indeed, there were a number of things in it that were essentially harmful. Money was spent on that presentation that was not spent on materials or staff or facilities. The teachers who were required to attend lost time that could have been spent preparing actual education for actual students: we could have been making our society better, instead of being tranined. And my brain was, I think, actually damaged by reading sentences like this:

Screenshot (4)

I don’t buy it.

Is this one good enough?

Dusty 1 Comment

This is how it feels to be an artist.

There’s never enough time. Everything you have to do takes you away from where you should be: working, sleeping, bathing, cleaning, eating, exercising, relaxing, dressing, smiling. It always has: you started too late in life, you didn’t work hard enough, you spent all those years in math class, working at Carvel Ice Cream, hanging out with friends. So much time wasted: and wouldn’t a real artist have spent that time making art? You know those artists you read about who ignore food and sleep and companionship when they’re working? Those are artists. You’re not an artist.

When there is time to spend on art, you spend it the wrong way doing the wrong things. Everything’s the wrong thing: you have too many ideas, and no idea which idea is the right idea. There’s supposed to be a click in your head when the right idea comes and settles into its place in your brain, and then the art will just flow out of you like milk and honey. But there’s no click. So you just pick something, something that seems interesting, maybe the most recent idea, because it’s often exciting when it’s new. Then as soon as you pick an idea and start working on it, something clicks in your brain, and you realize: this is the wrong idea. That other idea would be better, that old idea, the one you’ve had enough time to think about and really develop. What were you thinking, working on a just-born idea like that? So you change, and work on the other idea. It’s not the right idea either. But you know better than to change again, because you tried that thing once, working like that artist you read about who kept nineteen different projects going at the same time, gamboling about his studio adding a dash of color here, a touch of spice there, probably singing operatic arias and feeding the birds from his hand, like Cinderella, as he did so. But that never works for you. You have to do one thing at a time. So you keep working on this idea. Even though it’s the wrong idea. Because you need to do art, and if you don’t use the time you decided on and set aside for it, the time you clawed away from work and from sleep, you’re not an artist.

So you work. And it’s lovely. The world falls away: you don’t feel thirst or hunger, none of the needling of need, and your thoughts, blessedly, turn off. There is a glorious silence. Heaven forbid you have somewhere else to be and a time to depart, because you’ll miss it. Then again, if you don’t have a reason to stop, you may surrender all the light of the day, all the peace of the night, to your work. You arise from your working space with pins, needles, cricks, stiffenings, aches; now you’re hungry, now you’re thirsty. Now you’re an artist.

And it is to be hoped that you finished what you were working on. Because coming back to it after a stop, it never feels quite right. Time away from it gives you time to think about how wrong this idea is, and how it’s not coming out the way it’s supposed to come out (like milk and honey, it’s supposed to flow like milk and honey, to fall magically from your unconscious to your hand to the paper), and how you can’t quite make it feel the way it felt in your head when it was just an idea, and looking at it now you can’t remember what you were going to do next, and now you realize that you did that thing wrong — what were you thinking? That is terrible. You’re not an artist.

It’s only right when it’s finished. When something’s finished — and long finished, not ink-still-wet finished — then you sometimes look back at it and think, “Damn. That is good.” And then you think, “How the hell did I do that?” But right then, it doesn’t matter how: you did do that. That was you. That makes it all worthwhile. Because you’re an artist.

Except nobody else sees it. Nobody else cares about it. You send your work away to the people who buy and sell art, and they never even look at it, because they’re not concerned with art, they’re concerned with buying and selling. And you and your art won’t make them any money. You read of famous artists who were rejected over and over, twenty times, thirty times, before they were accepted, and they say “Never give up! Ignore rejection!” So you keep trying — twenty times, thirty, fifty. A hundred. Maybe you’re not as good as you thought you were. Maybe you’re not an artist.

But never mind: it’s art. It’s right there, and you made it, and it’s good art, you think. So you ignore the chorus of twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred small voices in your head that say, “No, that’s not what we want. That’s no good. You’re doing it wrong.” It helps now if you have loved ones who support you; they can drown out those voices. Mostly. Though their voices come with one other, a little one, dry and creaky and quiet like Jiminy Cricket and the Cryptkeeper rolled into one, and this voice says, “They’re only saying that because they love you.” But it’s only one voice. It’s easy to ignore. For a time.

But never mind: it’s art. It’s right there, and you made it, and it’s good art, you think. Maybe you just have to do something a little different. Maybe that other idea would be better. This one doesn’t feel right. That’s why it was rejected. It’s no problem, adding this piece to your collection of finished and unpublished pieces; someday they will write books about these, have displays in museums and galleries of your early work. This will be known, someday. It’s art, and you think it’s good. You’re an artist.

You do it again, and again, and again: lose yourself, finish a piece; let some time go by so you can see your work instead of seeing only a collaboration of flaws you couldn’t fix. No: this one’s good (“No good,” shout the fifty, the hundred.). And now you have a new plan: you’ll put it on the Internet. The hell with those fifty businessmen, those hundred empty suits, those Philistine fat cats; you’ll take your work in front of an audience yourself, take your message straight to the people, no middlemen. This is the digital age: you don’t need some corporate shill passing judgment on your work; all you need is a blog. You’re an artist.

You start a blog, maybe an online shop. You post your work. You wait.

One Like. Thanks, Mom.

Hey — now there are two Likes! Oh — never mind. It’s a spam bot.

Where are all those people? The ones who told you they loved your work? Who said you were great and talented? Who said they’d buy your work if it was published?

They’re buying other things. T-shirts and new shoes. SUVs. Vacations. Coffee. Beer. Concert tickets.

Not art.

Nobody buys art.

You try not to count the years. Sometimes you look at what you’ve done and you’re proud, you think, “Look at that. That’s a legacy.” Sometimes you look at the same work and you think, “How much time have I spent on this?” How much of my life have I given to this?” You think, “This isn’t right. I can’t be doing this right. Maybe I shouldn’t do this at all. I’m not an artist.”

But what else can you do? What are you, if you’re not an artist?

You think about why you became an artist. Obviously not for the money, you laugh — though it would have been nice to have made a lot of money. Or even some. Enough to buy something you could point to and say, “I paid for that with my art.” You can’t do that with a cup of coffee or an extra donut.

So why did you become an artist? Was it wrong? Has it all been a mistake? Is that why nobody buys your work? Why you’re only up to twelve followers on your blog, even though you have one hundred, two hundred, five hundred friends on Facebook? Share your art, get six Likes; share that kitten video, though, or that status about losing weight. Hell, asking for support in your choice to be an artist gets you a bigger response than your actual art does.

Now you feel a little bitter. A little mad at the world. We don’t live in a time or a place that values art. We should: art brings beauty and truth into our lives in a way we can abide, with just enough joy, just enough mercy to allow it to settle to our souls and become a part of us, making us larger, fuller, more whole. All the memes on the internet can’t match one genuine piece of art — which is why so many of those same memes are built on stolen art.

Yeah: that happens to you. Someone takes your idea, or takes the whole thing, your work, your art, and sells it themselves. You find out; you’re pissed; you look into the law — there’s nothing you can do. It’s the digital age, and nobody buys art. Everybody steals it. The laws protect those who make enough money to buy the laws.

You get a little more bitter.

Your art gets angrier. Sadder. It’s not as good, any more. People certainly aren’t going to buy it now, now that you’re ranting at them.

Now you face it. The end. You’ve tried long enough, done everything you could, you’ve done your best.

Do you give up? Surrender to the inevitable? There are too many good artists out there, and not enough people who buy art; the supply exceeds the demand. You’re just not good enough. Or is it lucky enough? Are you better than those who are making money doing what you do? Is there a secret to their success which you don’t know? You read the blogs of people who tell you they can give you the secret to making a living as an artist, but here’s the secret: you have to convince people that you know the secret to making a living as an artist, and then you get them to buy that secret — which is that you have to convince people that you know the secret to making a living as an artist, and then get them to buy that secret. Art is no longer a scene; now it’s a scheme.

So what do you do?

Do you give up?

If you give up, you’re not an artist, and you never were: everybody says that artists never give up, that artists are compelled to make art, that that compulsion is the only reason to be an artist: because you have no choice.

But it’s artists who sell art who say that. Just like the ones who say “Never give up! Ignore rejection!” are the ones who eventually got past the rejection to acceptance.

Not you. Maybe not yet: but maybe not ever.

So do you give up?

Are you an artist?

The Right Opinion

Dusty Leave a comment

There’s something I’m tired of hearing.

I get it all the time. Mostly because my interactions with other human beings take place almost exclusively in the classroom, where I talk to teenagers, or on the internet, where I talk to people on the internet. And as we all know, these are, far and away, the two most annoying groups of people on the planet. (Yes, I’m aware the second group includes me. Seeing as I’ve spent my entire life after the age of two in schools, in one way or another, I think I’m an honorary member of the first group, too. Of course I know I’m annoying. That’s beside the point.) And this is one of the most annoying things that people say. It’s annoying because it is an attempt to end discussion and debate, to validate the worst garbage that comes out of people’s brains: the thoughtlessness, the prejudice, the spite, the hate, the idiocy, the vapidity and superficiality — all of it. And I’m tired of it. So, by the power vested in me by my love of both thought and communication, and the energy and time vested by me in both of these aspects of human existence; by the authority I have gained through fifteen years of teaching, by the resentment and impatience that has built in me all that time and which has granted me the sheer gall to presume to say something like this, I hereby declare and assert:

Nobody has the right to an opinion.

That’s what people say that I’m tired of hearing. They say it in several different ways: Everyone has the right to their own opinion. That’s just what I think. We just have a difference of opinions, and we’ll have to agree to disagree. I’m entitled to my opinion.

That last one is the worst. That last one is the one that got me thinking about this subject for this blog. Because it says it all, doesn’t it? Entitled. I’m entitled to my opinion. Apart from the political baggage that has been strapped onto that word through the labeling of certain parts of the social safety net as “entitlements,” which apparently require “entitlement reform,” the word “entitled” contradicts itself. It means that you inherently deserve something, that it is yours by natural right; but when we call someone entitled, what we mean is that they don’t at all deserve the thing they claim, that they have it through underhanded means, or without justification — often because it was given to them without effort. That they didn’t earn what they feel “entitled” to.

And I’m thinking now that people aren’t entitled to have the opinions they claim to have.

I think you have to earn the right to have an opinion.

Not to voice it; once you have it, you have the freedom of speech and of the press, and you can shout your opinions from the rooftops — even if those opinions are offensive or unpatriotic or even inflammatory. You can post it on Facebook and you can whisper it to yourself in a movie theater and you can march around the streets wearing it on a sandwich board and you can even hold a parade declaring that you hold this opinion. Have at it, feel free; I would never stop you. In fact, I will applaud you.

But first you have to earn that opinion.

People need to earn their opinions because, first, people hold a lot of really stupid opinions. They think climate change is not real; they think the universe was created in six days about 6,000 years ago; they think that white people are better than all other people. They think that Will Ferrell is funny, they think that Jon Stewart is not, they think that Taylor Swift shouldn’t be forcibly removed from popular culture and never allowed to return. They think that 9/11 was an inside job and that Barack Obama is coming for their guns and that the worst thing the government has done in the last ten years is Benghazi. All of these opinions (Okay, forget about the middle three, there; those are examples of what we really mean when we say “That’s just my opinion,” which is personal preferences. But seriously: removed entirely from popular culture. I don’t mind her existing, but I don’t ever want to hear from her or see her again.) are not only held contrary to fact, but are held contrary to facts or despite facts that are patently obvious and really beyond contestation. And the excuse we allow people is the belief that everyone has the right to their own opinion. This is the justification for absurdities like insisting that schools teach Creationism alongside Darwinian evolution: because, we say, some people believe one thing and some people believe another thing, and both people have the right to their opinions, and we have to respect both opinions.

I can’t believe that people are too dumb to understand the evidence. I can’t believe that the truth is so hard to understand, or so hard to accept, that people are incapable of understanding and accepting it. Because some people do, and there’s nothing that makes those people inherently better than the people who do not. They are capable of accepting the truth: they just don’t. And the reason, I think, is that people don’t think about their opinions. They don’t look for evidence, and they don’t consider all sides of the issue. Why? Because they don’t have to. Because they already have their opinion, and they have the right to their opinion. And that’s why they believe stupid things. I don’t think that people are actually incapable of thought, even though they — oh, who am I kidding? Not “they.” We. — even though we act like it a lot of the time; but we don’t think when we believe we don’t have to, just as we don’t work when we don’t have to, and we don’t wear pants when we don’t have to. The idea that we have the right to our opinion simply because it is our opinion, the belief that everyone has this inherent, unalienable, natural right, and that it is sacrosanct — this is why these opinions still exist and why they are allowed to plague and annoy, and even to harm us.

No more. From now on, everyone, everywhere, has to earn their opinions.

And here’s how you do that: you have to think about your opinions. You have to consider all of the available evidence you have access to (On a sliding scale: the stronger the opinion, and the more important, the more evidence you must consider. We can hold tentative opinions when we don’t have all the facts yet, or when the subject isn’t all that important. Like whether cheesecake is a pie or a cake. Or if Star Trek was socially progressive for having the first interracial kiss on TV, or regressive for — every other kiss involving Captain Kirk. But those opinions must be tentative: held lightly, offered only with reservations.), and you have to listen to the opinions of those who think differently, and you have to think about whether those people might, in fact, be right. And when they are right, you have to adjust your opinion accordingly. You don’t have to change your opinion entirely; it is your opinion — but you have to include an exception, or a caveat, or an alternative. In other words, your opinion must be rational, and it must be open to change. You have to work on your opinions, and make them the very best opinions you could possibly have. Then — and only then –can you take pride in holding those opinions.

The other reason why people should earn their opinions is because the idea that we don’t, the idea that my opinion is as good as your opinion simply because it is my opinion, is used ever and always to end debate and discussion. I believe that discussion is necessary: discussion, communication, is how we gain — everything good, really. Collaboration and cooperation are necessary for society, and society is necessary to maintain both the species and the culture we have created. Communication creates empathy and understanding, which allows for acceptance and peace and harmony. Speaking your mind allows you to shape and solidify what you think; I often start these essays with little more than a single idea, and the rest only appears as I write it (I know: you can tell. Sorry about that.). Communication makes us better people, and happier people, and safer people — and therefore, I would argue, we should have some right to communicate, both the right to speak and the right to hear others speak to us.

Yes, I would argue. I argue a lot; that’s the way that I am annoying, both in the classroom and on the internet. People often don’t want to argue with me, and I can accept that; not everyone likes to struggle and fight. No problem. But even if we aren’t going to argue, we should at least discuss: we should share our ideas, our evidence, our thought process. This is how we learn and grow, this is how we gain respect for each other, and for our opinions: through communication, through conversation. I don’t have to argue, I don’t need to be right, to win or lose — but I do want to understand, and I do want to be understood. I need that. Yet too many of my discussions end the same way: the other person says, “Well, that’s just my opinion, and I’m entitled to that opinion. You’re entitled to yours.”

This sounds like a validation, but it isn’t. It’s the opposite: it’s a put-down. This is telling me that you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t want to share your thought with me: that I’m not worth the effort. This is blocking communication, and therefore also blocking understanding. This is imposing silence on me, not only depriving me of understanding your position, but also stopping me from making my position understood. You don’t have the right to do that, and if the way you do that is the statement, “That’s just my opinion, and I’m entitled to my opinion,” then you don’t have the right to that opinion. In fact, you’re not entitled to any opinion.

You have to earn your opinions.

That’s my opinion. Anyone care to discuss?