The Write Space: a blog for teachers and writers affiliated with the Connecticut Writing Project

Sorry for the cynicism, but ...

2012-02-01T21:17:00.002-05:00

Did anyone read Governor Malloy’s latest proposal for educational reform? Quite a mixed bag. Looks like he’s out to eliminate certification requirements as well as tenure. If he and Stefan Pryor get their way, superintendents will be able to run their schools like the private boarding school my wife worked at when we were first married. Half the faculty was 22 and fresh from school. They were smart kids but had no idea how to teach, and the turnover was incredible. One trustee actually floated a proposal to house the junior faculty in a college style dorm where they could party, thinking that this would retain them. But of course they were cheap. Room and board were provided, lousy as it was, but salaries were around $10,000 a year. I know this was almost twenty years ago now, but even twenty years ago I started at $30,000 in a district where salaries were modest, at best.

All these proposals are in the name of eliminating the red tape that prevents superintendents and boards of education from hiring the best, most talented people out there. Now I’m sure most of us can think of a situation or two when someone talented was entangled in some certification red tape. My wife had a teacher a few years ago who just couldn’t pass the math portion of the Praxis I, who actually got such test anxiety that she once vomited on the keyboard at the test site, and this prevented her from getting certified. The super at the time supported her and did everything he could to emergency certify her and retain her as long as possible, but ultimately the state called his hand and she had to be let go. She landed on her feet in a community college, but the district lost a talented teacher over a test that was irrelevant to her subject area. But let’s face it, this is not what Malloy is really opening the doors to. He wants districts to be able to hire people who aren’t certified, just as the elimination of tenure isn’t really about empowering superintendents to fire poor performing teachers. It’s about empowering boards of finance to eliminate the highest paid teachers. And if they successfully tie job performance to student performance on standardized tests, then the only thing one has to do to get rid of veteran teachers is assign them the lowest performing kids, set them up for failure by giving them kids with a history of failure. It’s that easy, isn’t it?

Sorry for my cynicism, but honestly, even if Malloy and Pryor aren’t thinking these things, we all know there are administrators and board members and local politicians who are, who are just drooling at the prospect of replacing the teachers at the top of the pay scale with a bunch of new, young, uncertified teachers who don’t have to be paid peanuts.

The only thing I liked in Malloy’s latest iteration of his plan to save education by scapegoating the teachers is his proposal to improve continuing education programs by replacing “generic continuing education programs presented in large auditoriums” with “high-quality programs … tailored to a teacher's particular needs.” Now that would be wonderful—if he can manage it. I remember when I got my first job, and my mother, a veteran elementary school teacher, sent me a sign that read, “When I die, I hope I die during an in-service program so that the transition from life to death will be seamless.” I put that up in the faculty room at my new school. Everyone laughed, but most had seen it before.

Professional development was never meant to be this way. When the educational enhancement acts were passed almost thirty years ago now, no one intended for us all to be packed into the auditorium for some generic, canned program, or for the offerings to change with every shift of the educational wind, or to be held captive to another lecture on blood-born pathogens, or to have our principals tell us to meet as a department or team and ‘come up with something.’ Me, I get calls all the time to provide PD, but ninety percent ask me to help them raise their CMT or CAPT scores. That’s not really PD. Typically, I ask to talk to the teachers, use the discussion as a sort of diagnostic, and then I propose something I think will be useful. And I assure the administrator that it WILL help scores, however indirectly. Which isn’t a lie, really, but it takes some persuasion. Often the administrator seems overwhelmed, underfunded, and at a loss. They, too, are under such pressure to raise scores. They’re just desperate.

Can Malloy and Pryor eliminate this mess? I’ll tell you one thing, it will cost more to provide “high quality programs tailored to a teacher’s particular needs” than it does to provide something canned and generic. Somehow I see this cost getting passed onto us. We’ll be required to get this new Master Educator Certificate to stay employed and at the top of our district’s pay scale, but we’ll have to pay for the coursework ourselves. Just watch.

Football, Literature, and Murder

2012-01-25T21:43:00.001-05:00

Friends and acquaintances are often surprised to learn that I played football in high school. I guess I just don’t seem the type, somehow, but I did. I was a very mediocre linebacker on a very good football team that won three conference championships and lost two state championships in my four years there. My senior year, our team was ranked fifteenth in New England.

These days, I still subscribe to Sports Illustrated as well as to the English Journal and Poets and Writers. I watch Sports Center at the gym on the elliptical trainer and watch games late at night after I make myself stop working.

During the playoff games this past weekend, I noticed that my friends on Facebook seemed pretty evenly divided between being engaged in the playoffs or offended by the undue attention a couple of sporting events were getting in the media and on Facebook. A lot of my more artsy friends, for lack of a better descriptor, found the football frenzy annoying.

I suppose football just doesn’t have the literary credibility or literary tradition that, say, baseball does. Not that baseball players are all that literary themselves, but baseball certainly has a rich literary tradition. Think of The Natural by Bernard Malamud, Shoeless Joe by F. P. Kinsella, Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof, The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn, or Summer of ’49 by David Halberstam, just to name a few. These are not just good reads. Some are borderline classics. The Natural was on the sophomore curriculum at the school where I used to teach.

Football has George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, published in 1963, and the lesser known follow up, Mad Ducks and Bears, published in 1971. If you can name another good work of literature about football, please let me know. The only other strong connection I can think of between literature and football is Jack Kerouac, who spurned a scholarship to play football at Boston College to argue with the football coach at Columbia, spend most of his time riding the bench, and then break a leg. (I read an interesting article once about how Kerouac and Ken Kesey, who wrestled, were crucial figures in the cultural transition from the hyper-masculine literary culture of Ernest Hemingway to the more feminized literary culture of the 1960’s. But that’s for another blog post).

Anyway, I couldn’t help but think about the irony of the fact that football is so un-literary, and yet one of the four teams in the conference playoffs, the Baltimore Ravens, was named for a work of literature, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” This happened in 1996 when Art Modell proposed moving the Cleveland Browns from Cleveland to Baltimore. The Browns were charter members of the AAFL in 1946, which became part of the American Football Conference in 1960. The outcry of the fan base when Modell proposed a move, on the team’s fiftieth anniversary no less, was so great that a very unusual deal was struck that allowed Modell to relocate the team providing the NFL committed itself to replacing the team with a new team, and Modell vacated the team name, its history, and its records. Modell agreed to this unusual arrangement, and found himself with a nameless team. A fan contest was put in place to name the new team in Baltimore, and the three finalist names were Marauders, Americans, and Ravens. In a final go-round, Ravens won with more than 33,000 votes.

Most of you reading this probably know that Poe spent much of his life in Baltimore, died under odd circumstances in Baltimore, and is buried in Baltimore, where since as early as the 1930s, two or more generations of a family have maintained a mysterious yearly vigil of bringing three roses and a half-filled bottle of cognac to his grave on the anniversary of his birth. (The first written account of this visit is in a 1950 newspaper article, but apocryphal stories say visits may have begun as much as two decades earlier). This year was the third year in a row that no visitor attended, bring a mysterious end to a mysterious tradition.

What struck me as odd and interesting watching the AFC playoff game this past Sunday was that the Ravens were playing the New England Patriots, who were charter members of the AFL, but from 1960 till 1970 were known as the Boston Patriots. This was interesting to me because Poe, despite his association with Baltimore, was actually born in Boston in 1809, and even published his first book of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in Boston in 1827. And rather than use his name, Poe published the work as merely, “A Bostonian.”

So the Patriots’ victory over the Ravens, their sixth in seven meetings over the years, struck me as a blow for the more literary town of Boston against a team whose name is likely lost upon a collection of players best known for linebacker and alleged murderer Ray Lewis. Lewis was originally charged with murder following a party at a nightclub after the Ravens won Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000. Ultimately, Lewis was convicted merely of obstruction of justice, even though the allegedly blood-splattered suit he wore on the night of the murders has never been found and no other suspects have ever been identified. Now that is a mystery worthy of the eminent Bostonian author.

The Snowy Day

2012-01-18T22:36:00.001-05:00

I was born eight years after Ezra Jack Keats first published The Snowy Day, which won the Caldecott Award in 1963. Today, that book is hailed as a landmark in children’s literature because of its simple, unassuming portrayal of a black child, named Peter, who goes out to play in the snow. The book is approaching its 50th anniversary, and has been featured in a number of news articles lately. Keats died in 1983, but a foundation named after him continues to promote his work, children’s literature in general, and libraries and teaching. In fact, this is the 24th year that the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation has awarded mini-grants to teachers and librarians (http://www.ezra-jack-keats.org/news/minigrant-program/).

I loved that book as a child. I don’t recall if I was at all aware of the fact that Peter’s skin color was significant. I grew up in a working class neighborhood just on the outskirts of New Haven, with black as well as white families. Later, my Catholic high school was mostly Irish and Italian Catholics (I was both) and African-Americans. All boys. And my father, in particular, always had a lot of black acquaintances from childhood. He and his nine siblings (or at least the first five of them!) grew up in a housing project called Brookside that had been made up of mostly Irish immigrants but at the time of his childhood was becoming increasingly African-American. So maybe at that age I was unaware of the significance.

I do recall, however, enjoying the fact that Peter was playing in the snow in an urban landscape that was familiar to me. There were sidewalks and apartment buildings and lamp posts and traffic signals. This was not the bucolic winter landscape I saw in most children’s stories. This looked like my neighborhood, off of State Street, where my friends and I could walk past the apartment buildings on our way to the A&P or East Rock Market, which still had wide board wooden floors from the previous century, and where my friend Gary’s mother worked the cash register.

Coincidentally, having just this weekend read about the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Snowy Day, it snowed Monday night (Martin Luther King Day, no less), and we woke to a 90 minute delay. I had watched the snowfall late at night with the porch light on, a jazz station tuned in on my laptop, and a glass of sangria left over from a dinner party we hosted on Sunday. My kids woke up full of excitement for the first real snow of the winter. I said to them, “If you want to play in the snow, go do it now while we have a 90 minute school delay, because by the time you get home this evening it will be almost dark and this snow will likely have turned to slush.”

Both kids were excited. Elsa, who just turned five, asked if she could put her snow clothes on right over her footed pajamas, and was elated when I told her yes. Cormac, who’s eight, just got new snow pants for Christmas, and so this was his first opportunity to try them out.

We just moved to this new place in Storrs last month. We are in a much less urban environment than when we were in Windham, but we also have children on our street here, which we did not in the old house. Our next door neighbors are colleagues of mine, and their youngest boy is only about ten months older than Cormac. I called and invited him to come over and sled in our yard before school. Not only was he excited to come join my kids, as it turns out, I ended up bringing him to school because the delay had caused some morning conflicts for his folks.

The three bundled up kids played in the snow for about three-quarters of an hour, till they got too wet and cold. I watched out the back windows as they sledded down the slight decline in our backyard, and when they disappeared from sight, I re-located them in the adjacent woods beneath some tall pines, shaking the snow from the low branches onto one another’s heads. When they came in, I threw all their stuff into the drier to be warm and toasty for school, and I made hot chocolate with marshmallows for them while they played upstairs till it was time to leave for school.

When I was reading about The Snowy Day in the Courant, Elsa noticed the cover art that accompanied the article, and said, “Hey, we have that book!” Cormac looked up to see what she was pointing at, and said, “Yeah, you used to read that to me when I was little. I loved that book.” So do I.

Originality and Assignments

2011-12-16T14:45:00.001-05:00

I had an unusually long time between my last class of the semester and the final exam. My students had over a week to prepare. I do not give a traditional sit-down final exam, especially since I teach a writing intensive course. Students spend the entire semester working hard on a full, fifteen-page term paper, so I don’t see the need for them to also come in and take a timed test with short answers to uniform questions. I’m not convinced that would be an accurate or useful assessment of anything in particular, and certainly no more rigorous than what I have already required them to do.

The last two regular class meetings were dedicated to response groups, supplemented by lots of one-on-one conferences with me. But since we had this long week and a day between the last class and the exam, I had many students in my office over the last few days, too, finishing up their drafts and working on bedeviling details like useful quotes, proper citation, or how to effectively conclude this paper they have been plugging away at for the past fourteen weeks.

During one conference that took place earlier today, a student remarked that professors must get tired of reading students’ essays, especially if they are all on the same topic and even more especially if they are poorly written. I agreed, but I also observed that many professors have none but themselves to blame for this situation when they give a uniform assignment to all the students. Of course they are all going to write similar papers if the topic is the same for all, and of course many of those are going to be poorly written, because there is only a small likelihood that many of the students will find such a canned topic of any direct interest to themselves.

My students might have to struggle with being given more independence and autonomy than they are used to or comfortable with, but most of them end up with interesting topics that, ultimately, they enjoy researching and writing about. And as for me, I get to read an incredibly varied set of essays.

This semester, I had twenty students. We read Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Twain, Dickinson, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau. Pretty straight-forward, canonical stuff. (It is a survey course, after all). But the students’ papers were anything but straight-forward or canonical. No discussion of the symbolism of Hester’s A. No discussion of the whiteness of the whale. No discussion of the personification of the House of Usher. No discussion of Thoreau, Whitman, or Dickinson’s embodiment of an Emersonian ideal.

Alana wrote about Joshua Komisarjevsky and the death penalty through the lens of Edgar Allan Poe. Andrew wrote about the entrapments of celebrity, focusing on Tiger Woods and Anthony Weiner, and in addition to Hester and Dimmesdale, discussed Don Draper from Mad Men. Liz wrote about female sexual repression in Poe and Hawthorne, but read additional texts by Henry James, Sigmund Freud, and William James. Brittany defended Harry Potter from attack by Harold Bloom using Emerson, Twain, and Joseph Campbell. Matt wrote about the importance of place in Whitman, Hawthorne, and various contemporary musical artists, such as Bruce Springsteen. Andrea wrote about educational leadership and read texts by Emerson, Twain, Paolo Freire, and other less well-known contemporary educational researchers. Alyssa wrote about abortion and gay rights, and cited texts as varied as the US Constitution, "Resistance to Civil Government," The Scarlet Letter, the New International Bible (used by Assemblies of God), and various abortion and gay rights rulings, including Roe v. Wade.

Bobby wrote about bullying. Spencer wrote about the sea. Kristina wrote about Casey Anthony. Mary wrote about theocracy and Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman. She’s a science major and had 21 sources, mostly news articles but also Puritan texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Peter wrote about American History X. Alex is a psychology major who wrote about isolation using several relevant psychological studies on monkeys and humans. Mark designed a course on minority literature. Steve wrote about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Alyssa wrote about the Byronic Hero, and brought her discussion into the contemporary era using Dexter. Laura wrote about the American Federation of Teachers New York City chapter, and read educational theory going back to Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Horace Mann, and Elizabeth Peabody. Jessica wrote about Landscape Architecture, and Gina wrote about Charles Manson.

Now I can’t guarantee that all of these will be well written, but I certainly won’t be bored reading twenty dull, uninspired versions of essentially the same assignment.

Books!

2011-12-08T22:37:00.001-05:00

I've spent the better part of the last couple of weeks unpacking boxes and putting things on shelves. I've concluded that my family owns mostly books. We have ratty, hand-me-down furniture, old furniture, and damaged furniture; we have prints and children's art but no real art, unless it was painted by an uncle or my step-mother; we have really faded carpets we bought at Target about ten years ago. Our television is about twenty years old and it's enormous. Quite simply, we don't buy nice things for ourselves. I have more clothes from Kohl's than from Nordstrom's or anywhere else. Besides food and utilities, we spend our money on education, travel, and books.

The kids themselves have hundreds of books. When we go places, our kids, like everyone else's kids, ask for everything, and we usually say no, because they don't really need that tchotchke thing they'll forget about in an hour and also because my salary has been frozen for four of the last five years and therefore I have no disposable income. But books I always buy. I buy nice books at the UConn Coop and I buy ridiculous books at Stop and Shop. Elsa has a thing for Disney Princess books that make me roll my eyes, but I still let her buy them. Cormac has graduated to really expensive, hard bound nonfiction like the Guinness Book of World Records or Ripley’s Believe It Or Not books, but he's at least old enough to know I can’t buy those every time we go to Stop and Shop. So he keeps a running list that he hauls out at holiday season and around his birthday.

Honestly, though. Each kid has two book shelves in his or her room, and then four big shelves at the bottom of a large book case in the living room of our new house. And Cormac has a Kindle, too! Amy and I have two floor-to-ceiling book cases in the living room, another two in this odd foyer-like space, and a smaller one near the front door. There's a system of shelves that comprises the entire wall of one room in the new office (which doubles as a playroom!), and then we have a wall of shelving in our bedroom, along with another floor-to-ceiling shelf and two smaller ones. And all those shelves are packed to capacity, even though a bunch of older books are packed away in boxes in the garage, and over the last two years we have given away literally hundreds of books. Truckloads, I kid you not. (And this doesn't even include all the books in my office).

We have one whole large book case full of just books in Spanish (Amy's) and another of books translated into English from Spanish (mine), and at least one long shelf of books in Italian (also Amy's). I have one whole book case just dedicated to African and African-American authors. Nineteenth-century American authors. Twentieth-century American authors. Modernist poets. Contemporary poets. Modern novelists. Composition theory. Literary criticism. Religion and mysticism. Erotica. Anthologies. Collections of short stories. Books on baseball. Travel books. Protest literature.

It's like a disease.

Here's an indication of how bad it's gotten generationally. Cormac had his eighth birthday this past September. I told people that he didn't need things but to get him gift certificates to the movies or to a restaurant where we could go with the friend who gave the gift. So most people complied with this request but a couple gave Cormac gift certificates to Target or Toys R Us, and a couple just gave him cash. So one day I took him to the abomination that is the dreaded Buckland Hills Shopping area, but when we went to Toys R Us and Target, Cormac couldn't find anything he wanted. He settled for some art supplies at Target, but was hard pressed to locate toys he really cared for. But we took that cash and went to Barnes and Noble and he was in heaven.

Some day I hope to live in a house with a really cool library or office where there's ample space for books upon books, and of course I don't want to ever have to move from this place. I want lots of shelves, good natural light, a nice big wooden desk, and a good chair. (In my most indulgent fantasies I also throw in a fireplace, a small porch with French doors, and a wet bar, but that's probably asking too much).

Moving Day

2011-12-02T14:00:00.001-05:00

Till I was three I lived with my parents in the basement of my maternal grandparents' house. About that time, with the help of my grandmother's sister, my folks bought a house three doors up the road from my grandparents. I don't remember much about living at my grandparents' house, though I do remember the renovations they did shortly after we moved. And I remember crying, even though we moved only 100 yards up the street and I came home to my grandparents' house every day after school.

We moved from that house when I was seven, just in time for second grade. My parents bought in Madison, where I went to school through eighth grade. But we moved within town a couple times—once only two years after we moved to the first house, for reasons I never knew, and then again when my parents separated. My father moved in with his brother, my mother moved in with her new boyfriend, and I moved back in with my grandparents, who had by that time also moved to the shoreline. I only stayed with them till my mother remarried and I moved into my step-father's duplex. They took the downstairs apartment and made a room for the new baby that was on the way. (That baby is now in the PhD program in Math at UConn and has dinner with us every Tuesday night!). I moved into the upstairs apartment and lived like a virtual emancipated minor. I spent one evening a week at my father and step-mother's and Sundays with the grandparents. My first semester of college, my mother and step-father moved again. So for me, that was seven or eight houses before I was twenty, and the longest I spent in any one home was six years.

Amy had a similarly peripatetic upbringing, moving from Dubuque, Iowa to Vernon, Connecticut when she was four, and then to Simsbury when she was seven, and then within Simsbury once before her parents divorced and so began a similar dual home existence. And she also never lived in any one place more than six years.

We just sold our house. It was our first home, and we lived there for twelve and a half years. Our kids, who are eight and five, have only known that house. Elsa is in a private pre-school, so she will stay put, but Cormac began a new elementary school this past Monday, and so today completes his first week in the new school. We're only renting for the time being, and likely will be for at least another year, but we plan to remain in Storrs, and hopefully can keep the kids in the same school till middle school begins, which in Mansfield is in fifth grade. I especially want Cormac to be able to stay in the same school next year and not have to change again. Elsa is more flexible, both because she's younger as well as because she's just that way constitutionally. She's happy and optimistic in some deep, genetic way, whereas Cormac is profoundly pensive and sensitive.

I joke that the next house we buy is the one I want to die in, and I say that because I just don't want to move again. Travel is nice, but moving is awful in almost every way. I want to buy a home that our kids can grow up in and know intimately, where there will be childhood friends, childhood memories, and eternally familiar streets.

So far, the transition has gone well. Cormac has been surprisingly adaptive, making new friends quickly. It helps that he likes his new teacher (especially since the one he left was awesome, and the first he liked in three years at his old school). And quite simply, he's getting more opportunities at his new school. He has regular art and music classes, and daily Spanish lessons. I asked him if he had learned any words in Spanish that he didn't already know, and he said no, but that he was learning to write in Spanish, which is new for him. Amy has spoken almost exclusively in Spanish to him since he was born, but we have only read to him a little in Spanish, and not required him to write at all.

Elsa, well, she can't wait till next year, but for her it's mostly because she wants to ride the bus. Actually, I think she wants to drive the bus, but that will have to wait.

Notes from Chicago

2011-11-18T17:53:00.000-05:00

This week I’m in Chicago for the National Writing Project Annual Meeting and the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention. It’s sort of a bittersweet affair because the National Writing Project is trying to re-invent itself after the loss of direct federal funding, something they have enjoyed for the last twenty years, while the NCTE is celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary and its 101st annual convention. The first annual convention was held here in Chicago in 1911.

According to the convention program, the first meeting was a one and a half day affair attended by 65 teachers from twelve states. There were two meeting rooms, one shared meal, and the annual dues were $2. The charge for the banquet at the meeting was $1.50. A photo in the program shows just slightly more male members than female members.

This week, including the meetings of subsidiary groups within NCTE, the meeting spans a full week, fills two of Chicago’s largest hotels, and involves tens of thousands of teachers—the vast majority of them women. One of the most notable things to me when I walked into the headquarters hotel was the large number of teachers sprawled across the floor, on the stairs, and in every conceivable nook and cranny of the hotel. It reminded me of an infestation of ladybugs. There were teachers everywhere! I once had an acquaintance tell me that there is nothing more frightening than a high school English teacher (she clearly had some bad ones), and I kept imagining her reaction had she been here to see thousands of English and Language Arts teachers just swarming the place. I pictured her face looking something like Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

For me, the first day was all Writing Project related functions and panels. And sadly, or frustratingly, we talked very little about teaching but mostly about fund raising, federal legislation, corporate giving, foundations, endowments, and advocacy. Necessary, but nothing that really stirs the passions. All I can say is that we at the CWP are fortunate to be such a long-standing, well established and well funded site. Many sites have already disappeared, and many more will struggle to sustain themselves through next year till various new sources of federal, private, and corporate funds become available to replace what was lost.

Today I would have liked to have spent the day in NCTE sessions, but mostly I worked on stuff from UConn, such as getting ready to take over and run a conference Monday for a colleague who had a heart attack. He’s all right, but of course unavailable for Monday, so I will fly in from Chicago Sunday evening, get the kids from my mother’s, unpack, lie down, get up, and go run a conference!

Tomorrow will be my day to attend sessions. I’m planning to attend panels on new research in the teaching of literacy, MA programs in English for educators, teacher-research, high school-college collaboration on college-level writing instruction, teaching literary criticism in high schools, and teaching creative writing in high schools. All of these in some way deal with collaborative efforts between high schools and colleges, which is perfect for me and informs me in my instruction of my undergraduate, pre-teaching and teaching majors.

I’ve seen several colleagues here, both from the school of education as well as from the composition program within the English department, and I brought three teachers with me, which is always cool. I love being able to provide this kind of professional opportunity to teachers (though I worry there might not be sufficient funds to do so next year). I was disappointed that I didn’t feel I could afford to bring any of the graduate students this year. I have brought two each of the last two years, and that’s always been great, to give them such a terrific professional opportunity at the start of their career and to see them interact with the veteran teachers who come. The students and the veterans always get so mutually energized by the shared experience.

And as much fun as the panels and workshops and roundtables are, it is at least as much fun to go out and socialize with different groups of teachers. We have a few drinks and a lot of fun, and we meet a lot of new people, teachers from other parts of the state and country, from other levels and other areas of the fields of English, Language Arts, and Rhetoric and Composition. And we also share ideas and hatch collaborative plans, pick each others’ brains, share successes, commiserate, and build or strengthen both personal and professional relationships.

My True War Story

2011-11-09T23:12:00.001-05:00

When I was a boy I used to make my father breakfast in bed every year on Veterans Day rather than on Fathers Day. No one seems to know when I began doing this or why, but every November 11, I would make my father a cup of coffee (yes, I learned how to make coffee by the age of eight) and then throw together some odd collection of foods for a makeshift breakfast. Cereal became a simple, successful solution, and when I got older I could make him his favorite—two sunny-side up eggs with rye toast, buttered. But when I was really young I would throw together things like a red delicious apple and some chopped walnuts I found in the cabinet.

My father was the fifth child in a family of ten. His father had not served during World War II, because he had such a large family to care for. (My father’s oldest brother, Bobby, was born in 1939 and there were three more boys before my dad came along in 1946). But my grandfather was a foreman at Winchester Repeating Arms in New Haven, which was a war time industry. My father graduated from Hillhouse in 1964. Two of his older brothers, Gordy and Red, attended college. Bobby had not graduated from high school. My father and his brother Buddy had high school degrees.

My dad was slicing meat in a deli at a local A&P in 1966, just as the US government was dramatically increasing the numbers of soldiers being sent to war, from just under 200,000 at the end of 1965 to nearly 400,000 by the end of 1966, about the time my father was sent to training camp in Georgia, where he made lieutenant, which was an entry level officer’s rank but also the rank with the highest casualty rate in Vietnam. He was sent overseas around June of 1967. He was lucky to be stationed in a supply depot just behind the front lines, and so never saw active combat. Years later, in one of the only instances I can recall of his talking to me about Vietnam, he told me that the scariest thing he ever had to do was night time guard duty. He said he never had to worry about falling asleep because he would be scared out of his mind the entire time.

My father was not the first in his family to go to war. Bobby was a paratrooper during the Korean War, and Gordy, the second oldest, had served in Vietnam already. Though none of the brothers seems to have had especially dangerous assignments, I honestly don’t know much about their service time because none of them ever talked about it.

For my father, I think the most difficult thing was not his experience in the war but his experience returning from the war. And I don’t mean getting spit on by protestors. I mean returning home to a familiar landscape that lacked people who should have been there, friends and acquaintances who, like him, had been drafted and sent to Vietnam, but who, unlike him, saw combat and either never returned or returned very changed men.

My father was too young to be a father. He was just 22 in the summer of 1968 when he got my mother pregnant. He just wasn’t ready for that, not by a long shot. He used to bring me around with him to softball games and basketball games, and invariably to the local bars for a few rounds afterwards. One time we were in this old Westville hangout called the Cape Codder when this red haired guy with a bushy moustache approached my father and greeted him with a sort of aggressive friendliness. My father, who was always gregarious and charming in social situations, became awkward, and quickly excused himself and got us out of there. Leaving, I noticed that the man had large bumps on his back, visible through his white t-shirt. In the car, my father told me how that guy had been a childhood acquaintance who’d come back from Vietnam remarkably changed. Where he’d once been shy and quiet, he returned loud, aggressive, and even violent. The bumps on his back were from exposure to napalm. Years later, I’d read about this guy in the New Haven Register. He had been charged with manslaughter for beating to death one of two homeless guys seeking shelter on a construction site where he was a foreman. Before my father’s friend could come to trial, the only witness, the other homeless guy who’d also been beaten but lived, died mysteriously in a violent attack witnessed by no one. Thus my father’s ‘friend’ avoided prosecution.

Now I know I probably don’t have all my facts right here. So much of this is second or even third hand, or relies on my memories from childhood. But this is my true war story. This is the story of war’s effects upon even the survivors and those who were lucky enough to endure war without combat. Of my father and his nine siblings, only Bobby, Gordy, and my father served. Bobby died at age 62. Gordy at 67. My father has largely been MIA since December 18, 2005. No direct causes, of course, but one has to wonder about intangibles such as fears that can only be witnessed in silences, concealed lumps beneath cotton shirts, or personalities intact but altered. My father returned from Vietnam safe and sound, unharmed in any visible way. He even went to college on the GI Bill and became, briefly, a high school biology teacher (though he lost that and almost every other job he ever held to alcohol). But how many years were lost to stress, to fear, to sadness? How much worse was his (or Bobby’s or Gordy’s) alcoholism made by the experience?

Friday is the 93rd year since the end of the War to End All Wars, and we’re no closer to the answers.

Driving and Teaching

2011-11-03T22:27:00.001-04:00

One thing I do way too much of for my job is drive around the state. My car is almost fifteen years old. It is the first new car I ever owned, and I bought it before I had tenure. That’s how old it is. But I do a lot of my own maintenance, and even though it has almost two-hundred thousand miles on it, it still gets around, still gets decent gas mileage, and still plays cassette tapes (which I still have stashed under the front seats). But I have to say, as much as all the driving can make me crazy, I do love visiting lots of different schools and school systems. I meet so many terrific teachers and administrators and get to see inside the culture of so many different schools.

I had a great visit locally this past week, to E.O. Smith High School, to observe one of the graduate interns I supervise in his placement with Denise Abercrombie. Eric, the student, can’t praise Denise enough. Not that that surprises any of us who know her. Together they are doing a unit that incorporates The Crucible, poetry, and bullying. In the lesson I saw, students were learning how to write persona poems, from the point of view of characters from Miller’s play, with a particular focus on bullying. Denise also showed me a hallway display that ties into a different student’s senior project that invites students to create these mixed media poems that are then posted in the hallway. Just amazing stuff.

I also got to meet with my department’s Director of Graduate Studies, Veronica Makowsky, to pitch the core component of a Fellowship I just received from a Neag School of Education program called Teachers for a New Era. TNE’s mission is to promote greater content area knowledge in teachers, and they are the ones who spearheaded the proposal for a dual degree program between the School of Education and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Anyway, my basic idea is to create and promote a terminal Master’s degree in English for high school English teachers (others could do it too, so long as they have an undergraduate degree in English) as their second MA. It would not involve a Graduate Assistantship to teach Freshman English, because presumably the students would already have their own classes to teach. It would involve evening classes, take about four years to complete at one class a semester, and require one Summer Institute with the Connecticut Writing Project. Among other things, those completing the degree would then be encouraged to become Early College Experience teachers who would then teach Freshman English as a high school ECE course for UConn credit. The education professors loved the idea when I proposed it as part of my Fellowship application, and my department head liked the idea when we had to secure his approval as the final piece of the application process. But now I had to garner the favor of the person who would be most directly affected by it—and to my great joy she loved the idea. Now I have to get the formal proposal written by the end of the month!

Later in the week I had another cool opportunity to meet with the Director of Secondary Education for Hartford Public Schools to propose an idea hatched by outgoing Creative Writing Program Director Penelope Pelizzon and me to expand the Creative Writing Program’s Wallace Stevens program. The program is about to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, and though it has always had a high school component, this has never involved more than a small contest for a few students at a couple of participating Hartford schools, and a poetry reading from the current Wallace Stevens poet. Penelope and I proposed developing an elective high school course, for ECE credit, with a university counterpart for undergraduates, in which the focus of the curriculum is the collected works of the fifty Wallace Stevens poets honored during the long history of the program. This basically involves an overview of the most honored poets of the late twentieth century, from Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, to Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, Adrienne Rich, Yusef Komunyakaa, Seamus Heaney, and Louise Glück, to name just a few. Among them are two Nobel Prize winners, twenty Pulitzer Prize winners, and a whole bunch of US Poet Laureates. The director, Kevin McCaskill, loved the idea, and now we have a follow up meeting with a half dozen building principals and the Director of Language Arts for the city. Very cool.

It’s exciting to work with interns, classroom teachers, professors, university program directors, and administrators from both the university and the public schools who are excited, have vision, and work efficiently to get things done that will benefit the students. All in all, it was a good week.

Advising Undergrads and Teaching Elementary Kids

2011-10-25T22:13:00.002-04:00

A former student of mine and my wife’s is currently teaching English in Spain. (She studied Spanish in high school with Amy and took American Literature with me at UConn, and double-majored in English and Spanish). Although she was incredibly excited about the opportunity to live and teach in Spain, she was at times driven to madness by the labyrinthine administrative procedures she had to go through to get herself abroad. At one point I told her that, once she arrived, she’d love living abroad and love teaching, but that most likely she was going to continue to encounter bureaucratic challenges at every turn. The key, I said, was finding people with the knowledge and the willingness to help her get things done.

I thought of this today as the advising period at UConn came to an end and all I’m left with are a few stragglers among my many advisees. Oddly enough, in the last couple days I have had three advisees come to me with what they assumed were impossible situations. One dual degree student in English and Special Education assumed she would have to abandon the English degree because she only had one advanced study course to take but was faced with the scheduling conflict of student teaching. Another dual degree student in English and Secondary Education assumed she’d have to abandon the English degree because she had two general education classes and three English classes left entering her senior year. A third had completed her undergraduate degrees in English and Elementary Education but wanted to take a grammar class that would be the last course she’d need to pursue certification in secondary as well. But she really needed to take the class at the graduate level so it would count as one of her graduate electives for her MA in Education. Like the others, she assumed she would not be able to do this.

I did a little investigation into each situation. I talked to the undergraduate academic advisor, the head of graduate English, the associate department head, the professor who teaches the grammar course, and a couple other individuals, and we figured out solutions for each young woman that would allow her to accomplish what she wanted. It involved independent studies, course conversions, course substitutions, summer classes, and some courses that double-dip (meaning they fulfill more than one requirement).

I don’t take credit for these solutions. I did not know how to resolve the challenges each case presented, but I was confident that solutions existed, and I knew who to ask. Invariably, the students were amazed that we were able to devise ways to allow them to complete their degrees in the ways they desired.

It’s geeky to admit, but I find it exciting to be able to help students in these ways. It’s one of the things I really enjoy about advising.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, as I attempt to help groom these undergraduates to become public school teachers, I am watching my own kids learn to read and write. This year Cormac is having a great time in third grade, and he loves his teacher. He said she never yells, she smiles a lot, and she makes learning fun. He also said she has cool clothes. He reads like crazy, and always has, but recently he’s also begun to write more in school. His latest piece is a story about a Tyrannosaurus Rex whose teeth were “the color of paper reflecting the glare of the sun,” and whose breath “smelled suspiciously like burgers.” This piece came out of a CMT prompt exercise that the teacher then embedded into a workshop where the class studied text features using a mentor text, and were asked to take their timed prompt response and revise it into a longer piece using the text features they learned about in the mentor text, and incorporating some target vocabulary words from a word bank—a nice integration of test prep into a larger, more sound set of practices.

Then there’s my daughter, who’s still in preschool. She just completed her first journal of dictated stories. Her first entry reads, “She was a girl that was bad. She destroyed the whole town. She had rocket ship power.” A little disturbing, but she ends with a sweet entry about herself and her best girlfriend, Mary. Elsa wrote, “This is the earth. It has continents and countries. Mary and I live there. There is a sun, and a sky that is blue. And a flower that is magenta. The sun and the flower center are orange, and the grass is green.”

Resistance to NCLB

2011-10-19T23:35:00.000-04:00

“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”

It’s an odd coincidence that I encountered this line from Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” tonight. It was late—is late as I write this—and I am preparing to teach tomorrow by reviewing the assigned readings. After a day of meeting with advisees, I ran off to the School Governance Council meeting for my son’s school, at which we had two guests from the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education (CABE), including its executive director, Bob Reader. Then I drove across the state in the rain to attend a roundtable discussion in Meriden hosted by US State Representative Chris Murphy’s education aide Linda Forman, at which we discussed the reauthorization and overhaul of the No Child Left Behind act. This act has been unauthorized for four years now but we are still subject to its controversial provisions.

At both meetings we discussed the roles and rights of parents, community members, and classroom teachers in the education of students. Members of school governance councils have the right and responsibility to advise building principals on budget, hiring, and school policies, and act as a liaison between and among the schools, the boards of education, and the parents and community members. But we have no real authority. Our advice on these issues is in no way binding. And there’s no funding from any agency—town, state, or federal—to assist us in our efforts to communicate with the public.

The 5th congressional district meeting I attended was informative but also passionate. Not contentious, as most of us were in relative agreement, but the outrage against NCLB and its provisions was deep and sincere. I’ve always felt like a bit of a conspiracy theorist for thinking that NCLB, by design, was intended to dismantle public education, but I was surprised, relieved, and disturbed to hear building principals, a superintendent, board of education members, and a higher education board of trustees member say essentially the same thing. There were many calls to scrap the law entirely—which of course isn’t going to happen. But much frustration was expressed, in particular that it took several years before the unrealistic goals of the law affected wealthy school districts, and that only until gold coast schools and shoreline schools and Litchfield County schools started to make the Failing Schools list did everyone become outspokenly outraged and begin to challenge this law.

Implicitly or explicitly, the consensus at both meetings was that we in education are surrounded by unjust laws that hold us to unattainable goals, constant means of measurement, a perpetual threat of punishment, and woefully inadequate funding for the tasks at hand.

Windham and Meriden are both priority school districts. Both have struggled for many years with the myriad challenges of urban education, and both have been pressed upon by the provisions of NCLB. Both suffer from so-called white flight (which has become more class-based than race-based, but still occurs) and both find themselves castigated for their inability to ameliorate all the challenges of meeting the educational needs of members of educational subgroups, such as English Language Learners. At the Windham School Governance Council meeting, we discussed the challenge of reaching out to community members, particularly from the Spanish-speaking community. At the Meriden NCLB Roundtable discussion, we discussed the unfairness of labeling a whole school a failure because of the inability to solve the problems experienced by students from various subgroups. In both meetings we discussed the need for targeted assistance, in terms of public outreach, student enrichment, and teacher professional development.

The federal law as it stands now is punitive in nature. It presupposes that teachers already possess the means to fix these problems but that we lack the incentive to enact the solutions. If we fail to fix these problems completely within the short time frame of a handful of years, then schools lose funds, administrators can be fired, schools can be closed, and funds are diverted from the public sector to the private sector as students are offered the opportunity to receive tutoring services from any number of approved, private service providers, such as Sylvan Learning Centers, to name a well known one.

But what we really need and want is a federal law that helps us to identify needs and that provides the human and financial resources to address those needs—be they outreach, instruction, or professional development—without the stigmatizing and punishment that characterizes current law.

I drove home, still in the rain, after a long day. After ten PM, I graded essays, finished re-reading Thoreau, and then wrote. I know that most of us work this hard. If only we had the support and the respect we need and deserve.

The Art of Leadership, or Knowing When to Leave People the Hell Alone

2011-10-13T13:47:00.003-04:00

Maybe it’s the difference between men and women, but we were all pleasantly surprised when UConn’s new president Susan Herbst announced that she planned to visit each department in the university to hold a meet and greet, question and answer session. I met President Hogan a couple of times, and he seemed nice enough, but he wasn’t that accessible. He appeared to be a fan of a type of photo-op accessibility rather than a sincere type of accessibility, such as President Herbst’s Open Door policy. President Hogan would show up at a student social function, camera crew in tow, have a beer, shake a few hands, and then leave. The one time I actually got to sit down and talk with him as part of a larger committee, he was stand-offish, and it seemed he had not read any of the documents under discussion. His secretary had, and she ran the meeting. By contrast, President Herbst showed up yesterday at our department meeting without any hangers-on, and had clearly done her research on our department and its programs. Besides that, she was candid and even funny at times. It was refreshing. I know we’re still in the honeymoon phase, but good starts are nice.

President Herbst’s visit made me think about leadership in general and educational leadership in particular. One of the things she talked about was the importance of hiring good people in the provost’s office and among the deans, getting them all on the same page (or reasonably close), and then leaving them alone to run the university so she can do the fundraising work that is so central to the job of university presidents these days. This made me think of what Teddy Roosevelt said about being president. I’m paraphrasing, but he said that the best executives are the ones who have the sense to pick the right men for the job and the wisdom to leave them the hell alone. It struck me that these are essential goals for leadership, teaching, and parenting: A sort of humane accessibility, a strong knowledge base, the ability to delegate authority or responsibility, and the restraint to let people do their own thing (including making the occasional mistake).

I think of the administrators I have worked for, and of their leadership styles. In my years as a high school teacher I had several superintendents, principals and assistant principals. The district I was in was for years characterized by a real administration carousel. Most of the administrators were neither awful nor great, but there were some of each. The worst superintendent I ever experienced was patently unethical. He lied. He pitted teachers against one another. When he retired, the whole building exhaled. The best super I ever had is still working in another district. I didn’t always agree with him, of course, but he was the kind of guy you could disagree with, even strongly disagree with, and the next day there was no recrimination. He did not take personal offense and he did not punish people. You could argue with him Monday and have a cup of coffee with him Tuesday. The best principal I ever worked for was similar.

My wife was once asked what her administrative style was, and she said, “Reluctant.” The student interviewing her was shocked, but I think that answer is brilliant. Beware people who are eager to be administrators. I always am concerned that such people want power, and that’s more than a little disturbing. Reluctance in an administrator runs the risk of indecisiveness, I suppose, but my experience is that competent people who have been pressed by others or circumstance into administrative positions oftentimes exercise their authority very judiciously and sparingly. I’d like to think I am that way as an administrator, teacher, and parent. In fact, I’d say that the biggest challenge I often experience in all those roles is that I sometimes confer too much authority and independence to others. Some students, interns, graduate assistants, and teachers thrive under such a situation (as does my son, by and large), showing great initiative and creativity, but others need much more guidance than is my wont to give (like my daughter, who is a little too eager to be independent!), and they flounder if I don’t perceive or they don’t ask about their need for greater guidance.

So hopefully President Herbst is the real deal, and we can enjoy both an open door and a reasonable amount of autonomy (properly funded, of course!).

Romanticizing the Data

2011-10-06T23:00:00.004-04:00

A young woman came to talk with me today during my office hours. She’s a freshman who’s very interested in becoming a high school English teacher. She wanted to discuss everything about the profession, and was particularly interested in picking my brain about my own career trajectory.

One of the things she was most concerned about was that when she visited her old high school to talk to several of her former teachers about her intentions to become a teacher, many told her not to do it. They were very dissatisfied with their own jobs and were dismayed with the state and direction of public school education.

She wanted to know if it was worth going into education. I told her yes, but not without caveats.

One of the most difficult things to impress upon the undergraduates who are studying to become teachers is that the profession is not going to conform to their fantasies or meet their idealized expectations. Yet I don’t want to discourage them. One of the problems I see, however, is that most of the students grew up with a love of books and a fascination with words. They wrote elaborate stories as children and kept journals and wrote poetry as adolescents. They were good at English, were in honors classes, and got good grades.

What they don’t realize is that this will not be the case for most of their students. Furthermore, they are largely unaware of the mandates that will be imposed upon them--the required assessments, the data collection, and the documentation that expands each year and reaches into every crevice of the day-to-day functioning of the teachers and their students.

This is not what they signed up for when they applied to the school of education, and yet they will have to learn to negotiate these demands if they are to succeed and if they are to avoid burnout.

I was at a meeting tonight at seven in the evening. I’d already had a long day that began with a frustrating 504 and PPT meeting for my son, followed by several hours of meetings with advisees and current students to discuss scheduling for the spring (already!) and to hold paper conferences. Then teaching till 5.

So I was sitting in this meeting planning a series of professional development workshops for the English, Language Arts, Social Studies, and Special Education teachers for a middle school on the shoreline. We were discussing CMT tests, disaggregation of data from content stands, Common Core Standards, changes to be made to CAPT that will significantly affect this year’s current eighth graders, and Common Formative Assessments, to name a few of the areas relevant to the workshops we’d be running for this district.

We paused for a bit toward the end of the meeting, and I thought of a former colleague I had as a high school teacher who used to say the funniest things in faculty meetings. He wasn’t an especially good teacher but his observations always cut through the BS and made us laugh ruefully at the morass of bureaucracy we all felt trapped in at times.

One day we were discussing CAPT and the implementation of monthly CAPT practice tests in grades 9 though 11, and how these were going to affect the greater curriculum, and how they should be scored, and how they would be incorporated into the quarterly grades, and how they should be standardized, and how this standardization should be accommodated according to tracks. You get the idea. In the midst of all this, my colleague speaks up during a pause and says, “Let me get this straight. I still require the kids to read books and write papers, right? ‘Cause I just want to be clear on the concept of what I’m supposed to be doing here.”

Another time we spent an entire faculty meeting discussing changes made to the attendance policy, and how these changes would affect all sorts of things. And my colleague speaks up and asks, “So I just want to make sure I’m clear on the policy here. If a kid is not in my class, I mark him absent, and if he is I mark him in attendance, right? Again, I just want to be clear on things.”

It made me think of my advisees and their love of language, and the very poised young woman who came to me today wanting to know if it was worth going into the profession, and I felt a pang of regret as I recalled spending many days as an undergrad sitting under a tree just reading a book. I never foresaw all this bureaucracy and data collection, either, and sometimes I long for my romanticized ideas that I seem to have outgrown so long ago.

Getting the Attention of the Undergrads

2011-09-29T22:25:00.002-04:00

Last Fall semester I designed my American Literature Since 1880 survey course around the theme of Evil in American Literature. I began designing the survey courses around themes several years ago to give the students a focus for discussion. Otherwise, a survey course runs the risk of just becoming a march through the chronology of masterworks. We read one book after another simply because its publishing date follows. Not very interesting.

The Evil course was exciting and fascinating. I selected a series of texts with paradigmatically evil characters such as Pap Finn, Popeye Vitelli, Stanley Kowalski, Lestat, and Anton Chigurh. We discussed slavery, murder, rape, war, vampirism, totalitarianism, infanticide, and the drug war.

The course went over so well that this fall when I was assigned a section of American Literature To 1880, I decided to come up with a variation on a theme. For this semester I designed the course around the theme of Deviance in Early American Literature. The first, most obvious text to include was The Scarlet Letter. It contains the obvious deviance of adultery, but both Hester and Dimmesdale also engage in theological and political deviance. There’s also witchcraft, gender issues, and class difference, to name a few. I also selected Poe’s only novel and several short stories, in which he explores the notion of perversity, or the human inclination to engage in reckless behavior that puts ourselves in physical, psychological, or spiritual danger. I of course selected Emerson’s “Divinity School Address,” which was considered so blasphemous at the time that he was afterwards banned from Harvard College for decades, and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” in which he famously says that “the true place for a just man is … a prison.” Dickinson, Whitman, Stowe, and Twain are on the syllabus, too.

But the most central text in terms of articulating the theme of Deviance and its centrality to early American literature is a little known work of Melville’s titled Pierre, or The Ambiguities. On the surface, the most obvious deviance in Pierre is the protagonist’s erotic attachment to a woman who may or may not be his illegitimate half sister. But there’s much more going on in this novel of ideas and its glacial plot. The work explores issues of personal and national identity in the decades immediately following the Revolutionary War.

Pierre Glendinning is the grandson of Revolutionary War heroes on both his maternal and paternal sides. Newly 21, he stands to inherit a vast estate purchased from Native American chieftains, to marry the local New England maiden, and become the de facto prince of Saddle Meadows. However, the novel makes us question the role of the Revolution in the psyche of the nation and its inhabitants. If revolutionary spirit is an essential character trait of Americanness, is it anathema for Pierre and those of his generation to come of age amidst luxury, ease, and conformity? Such a question is similar to those asked by Jonathan Edwards, who wrote “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in part to question the righteousness and godliness of later generation Puritans who had inherited the wealth and privilege that their ancestors had vainly believed were the marks of God’s election. Pierre simply asks a more secular version of essentially the same question.

To me, the most interesting part of the novel is toward the end when Pierre, his maybe sister Isabel (who is posing as his wife), and his former fiancée Lucy (who is posing as his cousin) are living together in rented rooms in a former church that has been converted to law offices on the bottom floors and artists’ studios on several upper floors. Pierre is attempting to make a living as a writer. Isabel hopes to play guitar and sing in the local taverns, and Lucy plans to sell her paintings. At this point in the novel, Melville becomes vicariously interested in artists and writers as marginal members of society, citizens he represents as deviant and poor but sincere and passionate, unlike Pierre’s socially and morally constipated mother and her peers who buy influence in church and state with charity and donations that thinly mask their implicit extortion.

The book is not an easy read by any means, but it is incredibly timely and relevant today. I ask the students to write essays that connect the texts to events in the contemporary era. As always, they find this pretty easy. Especially in campaign season. The first round of essays is due next week.

Strutting and Fretting Upon the Stage

2011-09-22T22:31:00.007-04:00

In hindsight, I made the mistake of playing football in high school. I should have taken more art classes and music classes. Or I really should have tried out for drama. But it was a real jock school and I wanted desperately to be on a team, even if it meant only playing in the fourth quarter during blowouts.

I began wishing I had done some acting the moment I started my high school teaching career and realized how well drama worked in the classroom. Years before I read Jeff Wilhelm’s You Gotta BE the Book, I had students acting out parts from Romeo and Juliet and The Crucible, A Streetcar Named Desire and Arsenic and Old Lace. I’ll never forget this one student I had who had been placed in foster care with a woman in our town. Gwen was one of the most difficult students I ever had in class, but she was stellar as Juliet, sitting on a chair perched atop a table to simulate the balcony scene of Act II, scene ii. Nothing else that whole year captured her imagination like playing that part.

Recently, my wife and I and a friend who teaches high school English went to see The Crucible at the Hartford Stage, and it was excellent. The three hour-long play was never tedious because the acting was so good. And I love the way the Hartford Stage is set up, with the seats in a horse shoe pattern around the perimeter of the protruding stage. There are no bad seats and the actors are in the midst of the audience.

Amy and I were season ticket holders for years when we lived in the Farmington Valley and then later the Hartford area. We’d buy tickets for the Thursday preview shows, which were cheaper. One time we were fortunate to have the playwright and director sitting directly behind us during a preview show, and we were able to listen to them discuss the play and make decisions about changes they wanted to make. Just fascinating conversation for us to overhear.

When I started at RHAM High School in the mid-90s, the school purchased one class set of season tickets every year, and I often volunteered to chaperone those trips. During the first or second unit of my first year, I read Romeo and Juliet with four sections of freshmen, and when I chaperoned the trip to see the play, I had at least one student from each section with me, which was terrific. We went while we were in the middle of the play, and afterwards I had a fourteen-year-old expert in each class. I could turn to one of these students and ask him or her to explain to the rest of the class how the stage was set for this scene, or what the actors did while speaking certain lines.

Calista Flockhart played Juliet, before she broke through with Ally McBeal. I still remember the reaction of one very innocent freshman named Shelley when Flockhart sensuously stroked one of the beams of her balcony as she said, “What's Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a man.” Shelley gasped and shouted, “That’s what that means?!”

Another time I brought seniors from an AP Lit class and from two sections of Creative Writing to see a production of Oedipus, and afterwards the actors came out to talk to the students. A middle school girl from one of the Hartford schools asked the lead actor why Oedipus’ family was so ill fated, and he gave an evasive answer, but one of my seniors, Rachel, raised her hand and answered the younger girl’s question, that as a young man Oedipus’ father Laius had violated the laws of hospitality and marriage, and for that his line was cursed.

My wife acted throughout high school and into college, as well as during her three year stint teaching at a boarding school, and then again in her MA program in Spanish at Middlebury College. As a high school kid she won awards playing Titania and Blanche DuBois. I saw her play a great drunk in A Man of the People, and one of the first dates we ever went on was to see Arms and the Man, where we became smitten with Raina and her Chocolate Cream Soldier.

Over the years we have seen perhaps a dozen Shakespeare plays, a good six or eights productions of A Christmas Carol, as well as many plays by Wilder, Shaw, Williams, Foote, Leroi Jones, O’Neill, Beckett, and Dylan Thomas, as well as many by less well known playwrights. We have a great playbill hanging over our bed of Phylicia Rashad as Angel in Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky. Hanging in our upstairs hallway is a collage I made for our tenth anniversary of all the ticket stubs from every show we went to—theater and music, as well as many other events—during the first decade of our marriage.

We like taking our kids to see plays at Jorgensen on the UConn campus and occasionally at the Windham Theatre Guild downtown in Willimantic. Our son is too shy to act in front of a crowd, but every summer in camp, our daughter volunteers to take a speaking part so she can get up in front of everyone and perform.

Next month Amy and I are going to see Wilder’s Our Town at the Connecticut Repertory Theater. I always loved teaching that play alongside Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Students love discovering the complexities hidden within the seemingly simple, small town characters. The final act of Our Town always pulls at my heart strings, which is hard to do.

I keep telling Amy that once the kids are a little older and our time is commensurately freed up a bit, she should get into community theater. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll give it a try.

Welcome to the New Gilded Age

2011-09-15T22:07:00.003-04:00

We got robbed the other day. Really. Some guy or guys parked their van in our driveway in the middle of the afternoon, broke into our house, and ransacked our bedroom, taking mostly jewelry.

That’s not the point of my story here. Two state troopers came to the house in the evening and helped us file a report. They were really nice guys. One, the younger of the two, was really sweet with my son. He sat on the edge of his bed and assured him that things would be all right, that they’d be patrolling the neighborhood regularly for the next couple days. He gave him a stuffed animal he had in his patrol car. The trooper looked familiar, and I wondered if I’d ever had him as a student. I didn’t, but he just graduated in 2003 from a local school where I know a few teachers and where I’ve done some professional development last year and this. I told him I’d say hi to his old English teachers for him.

At one point as the troopers were finishing up, they were trying to diplomatically explain that they’d make every effort to investigate the case and patrol the area but that they were a little understaffed and overworked. They were really apologetic. I said, Look, I get it. I’m a member of the SEBAC bargaining unit, too, and we’ve had nothing but freezes, give-backs and furlough days these last four years, and we’ll have more of the same for at least the next two—if they don’t make us renegotiate again in a year or two. The troopers were noticeably relieved that I understood the situation.

What this incident made me think of was how easy it is for any of us to fall into the trap of blaming people or groups of people who should be our allies. State troopers and prison guards are in the cross-hairs right now because they oppose the SEBAC agreement. Teachers have been in everyone’s cross-hairs for the last couple of years, and one thing I see and decry frequently in this column and elsewhere is the way voters and teachers become pitted against one another. In my town the teachers have been regularly reviled by the public, and this revulsion has been stirred up by the local press. Yet when our new Special Master Steve Adamowski came on board this past August, two things he announced publicly were that the education budget showed no obvious signs of waste, and that all evidence suggests that most teachers are making fair effort to meet the needs of the students, though many are making mistakes due to overwhelming circumstances and a lack of training and support (especially with ELLs).

Yet I would also add that the members of the public who oppose increased taxes have a legitimate gripe in a town that has fallen in the last decade from seventh to third poorest in the state.

Teachers and tax payers should be allies here, but we all too often fall into the trap of blaming each other.

Last week the Willimantic Chronicle printed a letter to the editor from Harry Carboni. Carboni is a local businessman and at one time was a perennial Republican candidate for first selectman. The gist of Carboni’s letter was that unionized employees like state troopers and public school teachers should be considered the new wealthy class because our collectively bargained contracts give us job security, pay, and benefits not enjoyed in most areas of the private sector. Clearly, those of us who are unionized are not suffering enough to satisfy Mr. Carboni.

Now I get the motivation for the argument, but I come to a very different conclusion from the same evidence. What I conclude is that workers in the private sector desperately need to organize and petition their employers for fair wages, decent benefits, and relative job security. The percentage of the workforce that is unionized has declined markedly since this time last century, and during that time the disparity between the wealthiest class and the middle class has widened. I admit that I can’t demonstrate causality here but only correlation, but the evidence suggests to me that most workers in the US today have long since lost many of the hard won gains achieved by the early labor movement at the same time that we have begun to enter a new Gilded Age.

I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I do believe we have to recognize our allies.

Do We Want an Outsider Making Inroads?

2011-09-07T22:30:00.002-04:00

I have to admit that this past spring I conducted a site visit for the UConn Early College Experience Program to the Amistad Academy in New Haven, and was impressed with what I observed. I saw dedicated teachers working hard with a lot of urban kids who were, by and large, about to become the first in their families to go to college.

I’d have to do a little more research to find out how much the Amistad Academy skims, like so many charters do. Do they take special education students, ELL students, and kids with histories of behavior problems, or do they only take the best behaved, most motivated, smartest, and least complicated of New Haven’s public school students?

So when I read this morning that Governor Malloy had selected Amistad founder Stefan Pryor to become Connecticut’s next State Commissioner of Education, I had a mixed reaction. I read several articles today about Pryor and the Amistad Academy. I found mixed information. There were reports that both praised and criticized the Amistad Academies in New Haven and elsewhere, and there were many reports that lauded Pryor as a Yale-educated wunderkind—the son of teachers who studied education at Yale and actually student-taught somewhere (I could not learn where), a former New Haven city alderman, the founder of the Amistad Academy, and a man who has worked in educational and economic development in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and most recently in Newark.

All this sounds pretty good on paper, but my cynical side makes me wonder about a few things. First of all, I’m glad he’s the son of teachers and once did student teaching, but being the son of teachers doesn’t really make one qualified to be a state commissioner of education. It’s kind of like saying, I’m not really a doctor but I play one on TV. And what happened after student teaching? Did he decide he hated teaching? Was he terrible at it? It is possible to not pass student teaching.

And then there’s the lengthy resume. The guy went to law school after he student taught, and he’s only 39 years old. I don’t know exactly how long he spent in law school, but I figure he’s been working for about fourteen years, and in that time he has worked at least four different jobs in three different states. That averages out to about three years and six months on each job. I don’t know, but when a teacher or an administrator comes into your district with a job-hopping resume like that, do you get your hopes up? I just assume that guy, good at his job or bad, is off to the next big thing as soon as it comes along. Several studies in teacher effectiveness suggest that it takes about five years for most teachers to develop into truly talented practitioners, and that peak effectiveness in the classroom occurs during the next decade. If the same can be said for commissioners of education, will Pryor stick around long enough to truly excel and make a difference? Past history suggests not.

The other thing that concerns me is that, regardless of the fact that the Amistad Academies have a better reputation than most charters, a pro-charter commissioner suggests that we now have someone in the commissioner’s office who will be less concerned about curriculum, instruction, and funding, and more concerned with the elimination of collective bargaining and tenure, the adoption of merit pay, and the tying of pay, promotion, and job security in general to student performance on standardized tests.

Interviewed today in the state capitol as he glad-handed legislators and educators, Pryor said a lot of the right things about closing the achievement gap, developing student job skills, providing adequate funding of schools, and offering quality professional development for teachers.

But he also said, "We need to improve the [teacher] evaluation system, improve the way compensation works; improve the career ladder, improve the retirement system and the removal mechanisms. It's the whole array of strategies related to talent in our school system."

So I have a few questions for Commissioner Pryor. Do you support collective bargaining rights for teachers? Do you support tenure? Will you prioritize curriculum, instruction, professional development, and funding, or will you focus your energies on the ways teachers are evaluated and compensated? And if you do attempt to alter the procedures that govern our livelihood, do you have any hard data that supports your proposals? Are you in for the long haul?

Welcome to the School Governance Council!

2011-05-05T22:21:00.000-04:00

I don’t know if this will be a good thing or not, but I am now on the School Governance Council of my son’s school. Back in March, the new principal sent out a form letter urging parents to nominate or self-nominate parents for an advisory board that would “elicit family and community feedback on various school decisions.” I self-nominated and sent the form in with my son in his Monday Morning Packet that his classroom teacher uses to communicate with parents. (She is in her 38th year of teaching and refuses to use email. That’s a whole other story). I hemmed and hawed a little before sucking it up and self-nominating. I don’t feel like I have any more time in my day to give to such a commitment, and I don’t seem to know how to do anything half-heartedly, but I also felt that I don’t really have the right to complain if I don’t get involved. And voting on the budgets is really not a sufficient level of involvement, particularly considering my position within the profession and the expertise I can offer such a council—if I say so myself.

The deadline for the nominations was April 15. I sent mine in well ahead of that date. Then my son’s Monday Morning Folder came home with him this past Monday, and there was my signed form right where I left it weeks ago. I know I could be frustrated with my seven-year old for not handing in the form, but I was more frustrated with the teacher for not removing it from this special folder. So I marched it down to the office and handed it to the principal personally. I apologized for its lateness and explained why it was late as best I could without seeming to blame the teacher. Turns out that there were so few nominations that the principal was delighted to get mine. Right then and there he said, “Welcome aboard!” So I’m happy to be on the council, but my excitement was mitigated by knowing that I made it as easily as I did because no one else wanted to do it. I also fear that I might be the School Governance Council, or that it’s me and some guy far right of center who hates teachers and wants to cut, cut, cut. We shall see, I suppose. We will have one meeting in June and then not again till the fall, so I will have all summer to think about what I have gotten myself into.

The list of responsibilities on which I am to advise looks impressive—the school improvement plan, the fiscal objectives of the budget, a parent survey, and non-collective bargaining policy. In reality, reading between the lines, it seems that the school has to develop a School Governance Council in order to be in compliance with federal Title I funding guidelines, which mandate that Title I schools must “develop and approve a school compact for parents, legal guardians, and students that outlines the school’s goals and academic focus, identifying ways that parents and school personnel can build a partnership to improve student learning.” So the council might simply exist to meet the letter of the law, and I might not be asked to do a whole lot of anything. Regardless, here I am.

In the meantime, the state department of education is moving closer to hiring a Special Master for the Windham School District to oversee its partial takeover of the Windham School system (that isn’t really a takeover). Of course the position of Special Master has never existed before, and so as the SDE moves forward to hire a Special Master it is also working with the legislature to draft a bill that would permit the appointment of said Special Master. (I think that is called putting the cart before the horse, but …). The SDE also announced that it would be providing $1 million for each of the next two years, mostly for professional development in teaching English Language Learners. This is because the population of ELL students in Windham has doubled in just the past few years, and the number of students receiving reduced or free lunch has climbed to above 70% of the school population. (When the 2009 census data was released, it revealed that between 1999 and 2009, Windham had dropped from seventh poorest town to third poorest. It now has a slightly higher rate of poverty than Bridgeport). One thing many teachers in and outside of Windham have noted, however, is that if Windham continues to pay its teachers as poorly as it does, the district is going to continue to struggle to attract and retain the best teachers. So there is concern that the $1 million spent each year on PD will merely train teachers who are going to leave and take their training elsewhere. We need to pay teachers better.

That said, it is easy to blame the voters who keep defeating the education budgets, but as long as funding is tied so directly to property taxes and housing prices in Windham County continue to plummet, I can’t entirely blame voters for defeating the education budgets. I can blame them for not voting (no referendum last year was voted on by even 15% of eligible voters) or for scapegoating the teachers as being the cause of problems that are too large to be solved by quality classroom instruction alone. But I can’t blame them for feeling that they have no more money to spend. I often feel that way, and I am much better off than most people in Windham.

But if I suggest that teacher salaries need to improve in order to attract and retain better teachers, I don’t think I will be asked to remain on the Governance Council next year. Unless of course no one nominates anyone again. Then the principal may have no choice but to listen to my advice, even if he never heeds it.

Two Worlds

2011-04-27T22:08:00.001-04:00

Tomorrow I’m conducting a site visit for the Freshman English Early College Experience Program at my high school. The one I graduated from. Catholic school. All boys. 1987.

I tell my current students how mine was the first freshman class to have a required computer course. It was one quarter long. I don’t recall learning anything other than word processing, and once the course was over, I never entered that computer lab again. Senior year I took a required typing class on manual typewriters. My teacher was Brother Benjamin. He’d sit at an elevated desk, tell us to turn to a certain page in our manuals, and then he would bring his hand down atop an old fashioned school bell to signal us to start. And we would type till he tapped the bell again. That was the class.

One time, my friend Bryan kept typing after Brother Benjamin had rung the bell. Brother yelled at Bryan to stop but Bryan kept typing, so Brother came down from his elevated desk, grabbed Bryan by the face, and repeatedly slapped Bryan’s cheeks till he stopped typing.

Brother Benjamin was old school. Literally. He’d been at the school since it opened in 1946, and when he got angry at us, he liked to regale us with gruesome stories of punishments he used to be allowed to mete out to students before the reforms of the early 1960’s. He’d tell stories of making students kneel for prolonged periods of time on the stone floors of the basement, or of requiring them to hold buckets of water in each hand with their arms outstretched and parallel to the floor.

One of our religion teachers, Mr. Zito, was an alumnus. When we told him the story of Bryan getting his cheeks slapped, Mr. Zito told us of the time he did a similar thing and Brother Benjamin threw his bell at Mr. Zito. He ducked and the bell crashed through the window. Brother Ben threatened the boys into secrecy about how the window broke.

I know Brother Ben must sound like a tyrant in these stories, but I think even his own tales were exaggerated for effect, and we generally found him to be a likeable old curmudgeon of a man. He ran the school store (we called it Brother Benny’s Bargain Basement), and that was one of the popular hangouts for upper classmen with privileges to roam the building and the grounds.

Not all the Brothers were so curmudgeonly. Brother Theodore, who had also been at the school since its inception and who was probably Brother Benjamin’s best friend, was a very gentle if eccentric old guy when I knew him. He rode a Harley and used to lift weights with the football team. He had a glass eye that he sometimes brandished at students to get their attention when it wandered from the class. By the time I knew him, he was no longer teaching but was in charge of trash detail. He would wander the halls during the day muttering in Latin.

He did me a good turn one time. We had a new Dean of Discipline (yes, that really was his title) who was hard core. He looked and dressed like an undertaker, and I got sent to his office only once, and for the stupidest of things. Socks. I got sent to the Dean of Discipline for not wearing socks on a warm day in May. Dress code violation. I was my typical sarcastic self in my defense, and got two detentions for my trouble—one for each sock I wasn’t wearing.

Being May, we had spring practice for football, which amounted to tryouts for the underclassmen. If I was late to practice, as I would be if I had detention, the coaches would make me run laps in cleats and full equipment. Brother Undertaker had assigned me to do trash detail with Brother Theodore. (Detention for us was never sitting in a room and quietly doing homework. We were always put to work doing menial jobs, like clearing rocks from the athletic fields).

Brother Theodore gave me a discrete task and told me I could go once I was done. I raced through my appointed job so hurriedly that Brother Theodore stopped me to ask why I was rushing. I told him how I was trying to avoid running laps. He asked what I had gotten the detentions for. I told him, and he said, “Jesus Christ, get to the locker room and get changed for practice, and don’t come back tomorrow. I’ll cover for you.”

We also had a core of younger brothers, sisters and lay people who had been trained in the post-Vatican II tradition, and who were progressive in their pedagogy and their theology. One of our morality teachers, Ms. Shade, had studied to be a nun but had left the sisterhood. I recall the rumors one Monday alleging she had gotten arrested with a group of Catholics for disarmament who had chained themselves to the gates outside Electric Boat to protest the building of another nuclear powered submarine.

Or there was Sister Pat Corcoran who taught a senior elective on Catholicism and Multinationalism, and one of the lay administrators, Mr. Neagle, who taught a popular course called Contemporary Issues in Modern Theology, in which we were encouraged to debate topics like abortion, the death penalty, just war, and relations with other religious groups. We even had sex education in our sophomore biology class.

One of my favorite teachers was Brother Greg, who ran the Campus Ministry, and who had transformed the program from a missionary service into a social justice oriented program through which students worked in soup kitchens and shelters, and ran counseling services for one another, girls at our sister schools, and even parent groups.

In hindsight, sometimes it was like living between two worlds, one intolerant and punitive, the other open and welcoming. I wonder what world I will discover tomorrow.

Silver Linings and Other Accolades

2011-04-20T21:46:00.002-04:00

There’s been a mixture of good news and bad news on the budgetary front lately. Governor Malloy has announced cuts that have come down to the university in the form of a rescission this year, a fund sweep, a 1.5% cut for next year, and a 3% cut for the following year.

But we also learned that the National Writing Project has been authorized to compete for competitive grants funds for FY11 and beyond. It’s not the news we wanted but it is better than a complete loss of funding.

The best financial news I received came from the Aetna Advisory Board, which voted to increase funding to support the Summer Institute, allowing us to hold a full Institute of sixteen teachers with eight credit stipends and eight cash stipends. We might not be able to do much of anything else, but we can still hold a robust Summer Institute.

Right now at the university we are winding down toward the end of the spring semester. My last day of classes is April 29. But that also means reports—two merit reports, a program report, intern evaluations, and staff evaluations—and observations—fifteen site visits in four weeks to observe Early College Experience (ECE) teachers teaching Freshman English in the high schools.

But it is also an exciting time. I have been interviewing candidates for the Summer Institute and have enjoyed sending out acceptance notifications to applicants who have been awarded Fellowships. As always, we have a terrific, talented, and diverse selection of teachers for this summer.

Their grade levels range from first grade to community college faculty. We have mostly English and Language Arts teachers, but several social studies teachers and one Spanish teacher. We have a bilingual educator from the Compañeros program at Windham Middle School, who is in the 6th Year Program in Bilingual Education at UConn, along with the Spanish teacher from New Britain. We have other graduate students in English and Education, and many teachers from urban districts. In fact, there has been a noticeable uptick in interest in the Summer Institute from graduate students, urban educators, and community college faculty. For a mixture of personal and professional reasons, these folks perceive a strong need for the professional development we can provide.

And as much as it is a hassle to drive all over the state to conduct the site visits for the ECE program, I also really enjoy going into all these different schools and observing so many different teachers. I learn a great deal about school cultures and I observe lots of good and sometimes even great teaching.

In the office we are finishing up the publication of the 23rd annual edition of Connecticut Student Writers. Submissions were a little down this year, but still exceeded 700, and it will be fun and exciting to hear all the students from each grade level read their published works at Recognition Night on May 10 at Jorgensen Auditorium.

I’m also preparing to attend graduation ceremonies this year for the first time. Now that I advise the dual degree students in English and Education, I suddenly have a large number of graduating seniors. Thirteen of my advisees and both of my undergraduate writing interns from this year will be among the 210 students taking English degrees. The department holds a reception for them in the CLAS Building where they can bring their parents to meet their professors, and we all stand around and chit-chat while we drink coffee and eat finger food. But then the faculty members don their robes and walk en masse with the seniors across the Great Lawn and over to the Gampel Pavilion for the graduation ceremonies. I hope we get warm weather, and I wish I had nicer robes. I bought the inexpensive ones with the cap that won’t stay on my head. But oh well. No one will be looking at me.

The other exciting thing this time of year is hearing students win awards for graduation or earn cool placements for next year if they are underclassmen or graduate students. On Tuesday, two advisees who are taking my Advance Composition course learned that they had been awarded highly sought after placements. One young woman in the dual degree program was chosen to be an undergraduate writing tutor in the Writing Center, and another who is an English major pursuing the Concentration in Teaching English learned she had received an internship with the Creative Writing Program’s Long River Review. A third student who will be doing Teach for America in the fall approached me to tell me she had just gotten an essay accepted for publication, and was asked to write a regular column as a first year teacher.

Later that evening I attended the Wallace Stevens Award ceremonies and got to hear yet another former student who had won the award this year read her poem before a full house of English students and faculty, as a warm up to the featured poet, August Kleinzahler. Afterwards, I went out for drinks with a cross section of award winning undergraduates, creative writing faculty members, and Kleinzahler himself. Maybe it’s nerdy on my part to say so, but it’s fun to watch all the young writers socializing with their professors and other professional writers. The undergraduates get so excited to meet the professors and poets, and honestly the professors and poets are equally energized and inspired by all these talented and ambitious undergraduates.

And then, finally, in the midst of all this, I am writing letters of recommendation upon letters of recommendation for graduating English majors to go to the Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates, or other graduate programs in Education, and for Education students who have finished their MA year to go on the job market, which is so thin this year. For the next several weeks my stomach will be in knots as I wait and hope for all these talented new graduates to land on their feet.

Playful or Fearful: Assessing and Grading Student Writing

2011-04-14T22:51:00.000-04:00

Last month I attended UConn’s Teaching Writing conference, sponsored by the Freshman English program. At lunch, they gave a graduate student teaching award to one of the 85 or so graduate students teaching Freshman English. In her acceptance speech, the woman who won talked about Play Theory, and she gave an example of a study conducted on playgrounds. In short, researchers found that children on a playscape in an open area tended to stay close to the playscape, whereas children on a playscape enclosed by a boundary tended to explore the enclosed area. The conclusion is that when students are given clear boundaries they will explore and take risks. By extension, when there are no clear limits, students will play conservatively.

I shared this idea with my students. I pointed out that, although I did not have Play Theory in mind, I did find the ideas compatible with my design of my course, especially my decision to give broad but very general guidelines for the term paper, and to only grade the final, end of semester product.

This week in the course we’re reading and discussing research in assessment, evaluation, and grading. Both in theory and practice, I promote a class environment in which there is quite a lot of assessment and evaluation but very little grading. I try to provide a lot of narrative feedback, from myself and classmates.

The big paper for the course is written in eight stages—a four page draft that goes to response groups, a four page draft that goes to me for written response; an eight page draft that goes to response groups, an eight page draft that goes to me for written response; a twelve page draft that goes to response groups, a twelve page draft that goes to me for written response; a sixteen page draft that goes to response groups, and a sixteen page draft that goes to me for written response. In addition to the required peer response groups, there are one-on-one conferences with me, both required and voluntary, and no grades till the end of the semester.

At each four page stage, students are asked to fold in a new subject area. They begin with memories of their own personal literacy. Next they are asked to theorize about their own literacy acquisition. The biggest challenge at this point becomes finding a focus, and in my written responses to their papers I try to suggest potential areas of focus. Then I ask the students to fold in a discussion of culture, looking at issues like gender, class, race, language, or disability, either their own or those they have observed in clinical placements, and how these issues might complicate their nascent ideas about literacy and the teaching of writing. Finally, I ask them to fold in a discussion of assessment.

There are many challenges that come with this assignment and my approach to it. The first stage lends itself to a chronological approach, but the papers tend to be better if the students break away from this. The culture stage always presents challenges because many students have a hard time seeing culture or cultural differences. They understand them in theory, but to see them in practice in a classroom or in their own lives is much more difficult.

The students also have to do a great deal of elaboration and revision, which drives them crazy. But this is exactly why I do not grade anything throughout this whole process. Grades prevent the students from taking any intellectual or stylistic risks. At face value, grades look like the fence in my play analogy, providing a clear boundary for the students. But, in fact, grades are nothing like the proverbial fence. Rather, my written and spoken feedback provide much more and better structure than grades do because response is so much more explicit and clear than a grade, which on its own can mean anything.

In fact, grades in this analogy become the fearful things that are out there which students avoid by being conservative and not taking risks. Students will stay on the familiar playscape precisely because they are afraid of grades. Good, useful, constructive feedback; regular, reliable response: these provide structure and security. These keep the fear of failure at bay. The fact that the students are ‘protected’ from grades makes them much more willing to take risks. They will try all sorts of things. They will even turn in drafts that are tentative, experimental, and incomplete.

Students will email drafts to me, and in the text will say things like, “I don’t know if it works, but I tried something radically different with this draft.” Or, “I know it’s really sloppy now, but after this week’s readings I really wanted to start all over again with a different approach.” These drafts would not be worthy of A’s, and we all know it, but I would never see students take these risks if they were afraid that these speculative drafts were going to come back to them with a big red C on them.

I also try to convince the students that when the semester ends after fourteen weeks, their essays will still be rough, and that’s OK. They have a hard time with this, but I have one student whom I have had more than once now that really gets it. She turned in an essay last semester that she was happy with but which she knew wasn’t done yet. She had done an excellent job in the course and I gave her an A. But around the start of the following semester, I got an email from her with a word document attached. Over the Xmas break, she had continued to revise the paper till she was truly happy with it. As she said, she needed more like eighteen weeks to finish, and the draft she had handed in as a final draft was really just a snapshot of an almost complete essay.

How often does that happen?

What a Time to be a Teacher

2011-04-06T22:39:00.003-04:00

I came home today to discover that the State Department of Education had decided to take over the Windham Public Schools. You can read the article here: http://www.courant.com/community/windham/hc-windham-schools-takeover-0407-20110406,0,5033464.story.

I did hear from others later that there are inaccuracies in the story, that the State is intervening to provide support but that a full takeover is not taking place, which seems consistent with certain information in the article. For instance, the so-called takeover is described as “friendly,” and the Board of Education and superintendent have not been removed. I spent part of my evening texting teachers and administrators in town, and we all have been emailing the article’s writer, Grace Merritt, asking for sources and/or clarification, but I, for one, can’t get her to respond to my emails. Perhaps time will tell.

In the meantime, I’m waiting to see if there will be a government shutdown over the budget. Even though the National Writing Project is currently not in the FY11 budget, I suppose there is still hope so long as there is no final budget. But with the Republicans in the House clamoring for some $51 billion in additional cuts, I’m not very hopeful that the NWP will make its way back in. As someone from the NWP national offices said to me at the Spring Meeting in DC last week, all these literacy programs were the low hanging fruit. We can’t expect to command enough respect to get reinstated into the budget.

From my conversations with people from the national offices, as well as from conversations with the legislative aides of our senators and congress people, the most likely scenario involves a series of events. Once the budget is finally passed, the legislature will have to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (affectionately known for the last several years as No Child Left Behind), and reauthorize the NWP within this act. Then we have to hope that the administration and the legislature provide competitive grant funds in this act. Before this shut down crisis, the Obama administration had been floating the proposal of about $340 million in competitive grant funds, which is nice but will hardly replace the $4 billion worth of cuts already made to literacy programs. But at least it’s something.

But then one last thing has to take place, and that is that congress has to provide a more precise and accurate definition of what an earmark is, and/or redefine what large national programs like the NWP are, so that the NWP and other programs such as Reading Is Fundamental or Teach for America can compete for these grants. As things stand now, the NWP is being treated as an earmark just as if it were some senator’s local pet project (like the proverbial bridge to nowhere in Alaska), and those competitive grant funds are only intended for states, not national organizations (or earmarked programs). So we would really benefit from a redefinition of earmarks as well as a redefinition that would allow national organizations to compete with states for grant funds.

I also wanted to note a few interesting things I read on the train ride back to Hartford from DC. A couple weeks ago I sat on a discussion panel that followed a screening of Waiting for Superman. That documentary lionizes former DC Chancellor of Schools Michelle Rhee, Mike Feinberg and David Levin’s KIPP schools, and Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone. Basically, these individuals and institutions are celebrated for having improved student success by busting teachers unions.

But the truth appears to be much more complicated than the notorious documentary makes it appear. The Washington Post has now reported that Michelle Rhee’s proclaimed successes may have been a result of deliberate fraud, that during her controversial tenure as Chancellor of Schools for Washington, D.C. there was widespread cheating on standardized tests. This cheating was not done by students but was done by administrators and/or staff members in administrative offices throughout more than 100 schools who allegedly changed answers on students’ tests. Erasure rates on these tests were statistically “too high.”

The Post also reported that the success of the KIPP schools has less to do with union busting and more to do with significant private funding, student attrition, and low rates of enrollment for disabled students and English Language Learners. For starters, the KIPP schools receive about $5000 in private funds per pupil beyond what the average public school student receives. Second, when students leave a KIPP school, they are not replaced, which lowers class sizes and increases per pupil spending. And most significantly, KIPP officials have admitted that they have significantly fewer students with disabilities and limited English proficiency than comparable urban public schools.

Similar findings have been made regarding the Harlem Children’s Zone, which received some $90 million dollars in start-up funding from the Gates Foundation, and last year raised approximately $36 million in private donations, thus dramatically raising per pupil spending beyond what it is in nearby public schools. And like the KIPP schools, the Children’s Zone enrolls few disabled students or English Language Learners. In fact, the ELL population at the Children’s Zone is only about 1% despite its location on 125th Street, which is one of the defining borders of the area known as Spanish Harlem.

Tell you what, here in Windham I will gladly keep all the Special Education and ELL students, as well as the collectively bargained rights of teachers, but give me an extra $5000 per student, and I bet we can improve those test scores.

Meanwhile, the House and the Supreme Court in two separate cases have provided the means for public dollars to go to religious schools. The House passed a measure (not law yet) that would allow vouchers to be used to send DC public school students to Catholic schools. And a couple days later the Supreme Court ruled that an Arizona law that allows tax credits to be used to send students to parochial schools is constitutional. The court was predictably split 5-4 on that ruling.

What a time to be a teacher.

Leaner and Meaner

2011-03-31T06:18:00.001-04:00

I’m writing on an Amtrak train on the way to Washington, DC, to lobby for continued funding for the National Writing Project, which right now feels like a futile effort. As you probably know, the current temporary federal budget eliminates about four billion dollars in literacy programs, including the National Writing Project, Reading Is Fundamental, and Teach for America, among the more notable programs. I have heard that there are fifty-seven programs slated for elimination.

But here I am along with hundreds of other Teacher-Consultants of writing projects from all over the country converging on DC for three days of aggressive lobbying to try and convince Congress to reinstate direct funding for the NWP, and perhaps for other programs as well. But things don’t look sanguine. The NWP has already laid off sixty percent of the staff at the National offices. Barring a minor miracle in the coming weeks, most will lose their jobs come May 31. A second round of layoffs will become effective at the end of August.

Without federal funding, many if not most of the more than two hundred writing project sites around the country will vanish. We are fortunate that we will most certainly survive, albeit in a very diminished capacity. The CWP-Storrs existed for nearly a decade before federal funds arrived in 1991. We were instrumental in creating the Aetna endowment in the English Department, and continue to receive fairly significant funds from the Aetna Chair. These funds will enable us to continue the core work of holding a summer institute every year, even though it may mean taking fewer teachers each summer.

Beyond that, we will have to see what other funding sources exist or can be found. Professional development, though districts have limited funds at this time, will continue to bring in some revenue, and then of course there are other grant opportunities to apply for. This is how the CWP funded itself for years before the federal grant. And the folks at the national office expect the federal government to make competitive grant funds available to compete for, though we would be in competition with organizations like Teach for America and RIF, which previously the NWP had partnered with.

I wonder how many legislators are even aware that the NWP had been providing professional development for teachers in Teach for America, helping improve the retention rates of its teachers, or that the NWP has been working with RIF to publish bilingual books for use in schools to help support ELL instruction? Now we will have to compete with those entities rather than work together, though hopefully partnerships will be accepted in at least some of the grant proposals. Much is left to be seen, and the next couple of years will bring a great deal of change.

In the meantime, we continue to move forward. Connecticut Student Writers magazine is all laid out and being proofread and will soon head to the printers. Recognition Night is May 10. We have received nineteen applications for Fellowships to attend the Summer Institute, including elementary teachers, middle and high school teachers, community college instructors, and several graduate students in English, English Education, and Bilingual education. We have mostly English, Language Arts, and Social Studies applicants, as usual, but also a Spanish teacher, so we should have a strong ELL component this summer. And the ELL Network is the only one of the Special Focus Networks the NWP did not cut in response to the federal cuts. (Presumably there is a secondary source of funding for that).

We are also moving along with the Site Early History Project. Our former undergraduate writing intern conducted a few interviews last semester with some veteran Teacher-Consultants, but current intern Sarah Garry has done some amazing work tracking down many of the original founders of the CWP from the early 80s. Sarah has conducted in person, phone, and email interviews with several individuals. Bill Curtin drove up to campus to be interviewed in person. Bill developed and taught the Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers course I now teach. Ann Policelli was interviewed by phone. Bill Curtin had told Sarah that, while he and others put their names on most of the official documents for the CWP, Ann actually did most of the day to day work, which she confirmed in her interview. Joan Hall, who was the first woman hired for a tenure track position in UConn’s English department, was also interviewed by phone. Joan did not work directly with the CWP, but she had been very involved for several years with Writing UConn, the predecessor to the Long River Review, which the CWP began in 1983 and funded throughout the 80s. We also found Bill Scheidley, living and still teaching in Colorado. Bill was the second director after former department head Bill Rosen, who has sadly passed away.

We’re still trying to nail down Mary Mackley for an interview, and to locate other important faculty from the early years, such as Karen Jambeck and Matt Proser. Matt is local. Karen appears to be living out west somewhere. Mary is just elusive. (Those of us close to Mary may recall how much she always loved technology. And yes, that line is dripping with sarcasm). All the interviews will be published later this spring in the newsletter. A summer writing intern will pick up where Sarah leaves off, and continue tracking down and interviewing some of the founders, and will perhaps work with the NWP and/or the Dodd Center’s special collections library to document and archive pre-1991 publications, such as Writing UConn, old copies of Connecticut Student Writers, and other documents such as the Summer Institute chapbooks and some collections of creative writing by graduate students from 1986-88, when the CWP conducted the professional development training for the English grad students preparing to teach Freshman English.

Anyway, we’re still here and will still be here in the coming years. We may be a little leaner, but that, too, may change.

Blaming the Victims

2011-03-23T22:32:00.006-04:00

A few weeks ago I wrote about the article I published in UConn Magazine, and I mentioned that I received a letter that was disturbing.

A couple things happened this past week that made me think of that letter. One was an article in The Hartford Courant and the other was a viewing of Waiting For Superman I attended at Saint Joseph College.

The article in the Courant affirmed my research, and because of its greater length went into more detail about the causes of Windham’s struggles. I went to the online article so I could share the link to my article, since it was so similar. And I suppose I shouldn’t have been so shocked, but what I found was an outpouring of hate. I entered the conversation. I tried to remain civil and urge others to be compassionate toward the poor, and to offer suggestions rather than just blame the victims. It was like spitting into the wind.

Let me share excerpts from the letter sent to me and from the posted comments in response to the Courant article.

“Your article is informative, but, in my opinion, doesn’t go far enough as to delving into the meat of the problem. Why is it Hispanic and English language learners? I bet 99.9% of the aforementioned group were born in the U.S. Either English wasn’t spoken/taught at home; or maybe these children’s parents just don’t want to learn English. … . I personally know many P.R.’s who have live in this country for 10, 20, and even 30 years and speak very little English, if that. The Puerto Rican people refer to themselves as my people and to the white people as your people. … . More so than any other race in my experiences Mexicans have next to no use for the ghringoes. I know the look in their eyes, my parents taught me that look of contempt. Puerto Ricans most times in the streets won’t even make eye contact. Puerto Ricans will speak Spanish, in one’s presence even though they speak English well—why is that? That is 100% rude behavior. …

In summation, some P.R.’s, Mexicans, … etc. learn English and assimilate, but way to many don’t assimilate. … Why?”

The writer also discusses his struggles with PTSD and homelessness, and I suppose I dismissed the letter as the rantings of someone with mental illness. I figured he deserved my sympathy more than my anger. And perhaps he does.

But then came the responses to the Courant article. To really understand the context, you have to read the article, but here follow some representative excerpts.

The first respondent talked about the drug problem in Windham, and the second was critical of the parents of the bilingual children. Both men’s opinions were more conservative than mine, but neither was what I considered especially hateful or racist. But then things began to get nastier. A man identified as wakeup4education wrote, “The fundmental problem is not poverty vs. affluent, it's the value system of all cultures that determine the success of students not the money. If familes don't value education students will ne disrepectful and apathic to education and scores will reflect this.”

Fyr85ftr then wrote, “Windham Schools slow to adapt to the change in demographics?? Did the Windham Scool district suddly end up in the middle of Hispanola or is it still in eastern Connecticut where it has been since the textile days?? These people have moved here, and not only are they feeding off our tax dollars, we are now expected to change our primary language in our AMERICAN schools to suit them. I wonder if they would do that for us????, Every visit Mexico or Peurto Rico---- I have a feeling they would not. Smarten up America, get rid of the bleeding heart liberal politicians.”

John McCommas, a local guy who has previously run unsuccessfully for office in Windham, and who identifies himself on his blog as “your run of the mill mean cranky conservative,” then posts two responses in which he attacks the Windham Board of Education, the Board of Finance, teachers, bilingual education, politicians in general, the article’s author, and the Spanish-speaking community.

Later, Baborn3 writes, “Welcome to Liberalism. If the community wants to correct the problem and doesn't care about the PC crowd then start checking the parents for 'green cards'. If it's found that they are in this country illeagally then no school and no school meals. If the 'emo' liberals don't like it then they can use their money and start a private school to care for these people.”

Little bo peep follows with, “It is my opinion that any child should be required to speak English to qualify for school. The public school system should not be in the business of teaching children the language of this country. Parents are the ones who should be teaching their children to speak English. “

Others claim that the Puerto Ricans all have nicer cars than they do, or that they let their children stay up too late. Several respondents refer to the illegals in Windham, even though the largest Spanish-speaking population is from Puerto Rico, and they are US citizens. The most recent comment states, “So what is the underlying reason for the massive influx of non English speaking layabouts to Windham? Is New Haven full? The schools are reflecting the decline of the town, not leading it.”

This is not to say that some respondents didn’t offer constructive criticism, but others ‘defended’ the Spanish-speaking population by writing things like “scratch a conservative, find a racist,” which is not helpful.

As much as these comments bothered me, they bothered me all the more after I participated in a panel discussion of Waiting For Superman. As much as I was bothered by the union-bashing in that documentary, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the children and families the documentary focuses on, most of whom are African-American or Latino. All were poor, but of course the children were smart, the parents were loving, and everyone valued education. Perhaps these parents are exceptional among parents for their initiative and determination, but in terms of their intelligence, their love, and their valuing of education, I suspect they are more representative than exceptional. And seeing them just made those comments, like the letter sent to me, stab me time and time again.

Two Funerals and a Poem

2011-03-16T23:34:00.005-04:00

Last week was Spring Break at UConn. I had debated whether or not I would give myself the week off from the blog or write something anyway. I had pretty much settled on writing something anyway, but then had a death in the family followed by the death of the mother of a good friend. My break ended up being bookended by two funerals. So, no blog post.

I had been thinking of several ideas to write about—Bilingual education, which I have been doing some research in lately. CAPT, which many of you have been dealing with, and which I have been grappling with as I work with the English department faculty at a local high school. NCLB. Did you all see the report that says that 82% of all public schools would be listed as failing this year under the guidelines established by the Bush-era law that the Obama administration has yet to alter?

Anyway, I actually had some really nice ideas about death. Or about death and literature, I should say.

To the chagrin of my students in American Literature, I have a fondness for the high modernist poets, like William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. One of my favorite poems of all time is Stevens’ “Sunday Morning.” It’s essentially atheistic, so my apologies to the religious among you, but what I like about it is that it demands an appreciation for life in the here and now.

In the fifth stanza, Stevens writes, “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,/Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams/And our desires.” He proceeds to describe the way death makes us appreciate the ephemeral beauty of nature, or the way “obliteration” makes us appreciate even the smallest things in life, like the smell of ripening fruit, the look of a blue sky, the sound of music, or even the feel of clothes upon our skin.

I thought of this poem many times during the week. I especially thought of it throughout the services for my step-grandmother the previous Friday. My father and step-mother were married for about nineteen years—three more than my father and mother were married—and I have always been and have remained on very good terms with my step-family. But whereas I had once been very close to them, especially to my step-brother, in the wake of our parents’ divorce, we had slowly drifted apart. No animosity, no bad feelings, just a gradual drift, just succumbing to distance and the demands of careers and children.

My step-brother has three children, all boys. The oldest is a few months older than my son, and the middle child and my daughter are almost the exact same age. His youngest is about fifteen months old. My step-sister has a daughter who is three. Before we sat shivah together in the days following the burial (my step-family is Jewish, and shivah is the period of mourning that follows a burial), I had not seen the two oldest boys in three years, and I had never met the youngest boy or my step-sister’s daughter. I don’t think my step-brother had ever met my daughter, or at least not since she was an infant, and she just turned four.

So on the Sunday following the Friday burial, Amy and I brought the kids to my step-mother’s house, and all the adults fawned over the children, and our six kids paired off and played nicely together. The two little girls at one point late in the day were snuggled up together on a couch in a finished basement playroom, all wrapped up in a blanket watching cartoons. My son and my step-brother’s oldest played various games together all afternoon, and the middle boy went back and forth between the two older boys the two slightly younger girls. They all asked to have play dates again some time soon, and gave one another hugs and kisses goodbye when it was time to leave.

The Saturday after my step-grandmother was buried, I was reading stories to my son at bed time when the phone rang and we learned that our friend’s mother had died. She was only fifty-seven and had been suffering from lung cancer. Her two daughters are former students, and the younger of the two in particular has become a dear friend. And so once again we geared up for a wake and a funeral.

At the church, I sat with another former student who has become a close friend. The mass was terribly sad. Afterwards, however, we all met at a local restaurant for buffet dinner and drinks. Old friends and family members laughed and embraced. The deceased’s ex-husband went around taking photos of tables, as one would expect at a wedding. Children ran around playing tag and other children’s games. I sat at a table with several friends I knew but also with several friends from Vermont I had never met before. One young woman was especially fun and funny, just full of life and personality. There was as much laughter, even from the two young women whose mother had died, as if we were at any other dinner party.

I had to step outside of myself at times and pay attention to what was happening. It was beautiful in its own way. It was beautiful to come together with family and friends I had not seen in years. It was beautiful to meet new friends and see disparate pieces of my friend’s life come together and cohere. It was beautiful to see children playing and snuggling, and crying when they had to part, even though they had only just met hours before. It was beautiful to see the elderly smiling at the children. It was beautiful to see my friend wearing her mother’s jewelry. It was beautiful to see my step-brother sweep my daughter into his arms and kiss her cheek. It was oddly beautiful to think that two deaths had made this possible.

Cars, Cash, or Kids? What's Your Priority?

2011-03-03T23:40:00.002-05:00

By now you’ve likely heard that President Obama signed a short term bill to fund the government for the next two weeks that eliminated four billion dollars in education funding. The cuts eliminate virtually every literacy program funded by the Department of Education, including the National Writing Project, but also Teach for America, Reading Is Fundamental, and Arts in Education, to name a few of the better known programs.

This does not necessarily mean that these programs are definitely gone, as this bill is only a stop-gap measure that forestalls government shutdown for two weeks. Once the congress and the president actually pass a bill into law to cover the entire fiscal year, any number of these programs might make it back in. But if this short-tem bill is to be a template for what will ultimately be agreed upon, I’m not sanguine.

I was watching a couple of clips of Jon Stewart on the Daily Show as he defends teachers by satirically attacking them. I was laughing so hard I was almost in tears, which is good for me, because generally I have been terribly angry about attacks on teachers from the press and the legislatures. The blaming and the scapegoating are unlike anything I have ever seen, or anything my parents’ generation has ever seen. My mother, a former first grade teacher who worked for thirty-six years, feels betrayed, and says things are worse than in the late 1970s and early 80s when there were teacher strikes. But Stewart is so on point because he makes it really clear that teachers and education in general are not the source of our societal and financial problems, and that the money we need to stimulate the economy sure isn’t going to come from teachers.

To give an idea of just how skewed things are, think about all the literacy programs eliminated by the four billion dollars that were just cut. By comparison, conservative estimates of the cost of the auto industry and finance industry bailouts place them at about $24 billion and $50 billion, respectively—and that’s after GM and AIG and all the other firms paid back most of their loans. Prior to those payments, our government had loaned out hundreds of billions of dollars to various firms in just those two sectors of the economy. Those firms were deemed too big to fail because of the impact their failure would have on the larger economy, but apparently the education sector of the economy is not too big to fail. (Don’t even get me started on the multi-trillion dollar defense and national security budgets!).

According to the provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act, which have not yet been amended by the Obama administration, one hundred percent of children must be proficient in reading and math by the year 2014, but apparently we won’t be needing those programs funded by those four billion dollars to help us help the students reach one hundred percent proficiency for all in, well, three years now.

What’s even worse, to me, is that the auto and finance industries were victims of their own mismanagement, and, in some cases, outright corruption and greed. Education has its shortcomings and failings, but programs like the National Writing Project and Reading Is Fundamental have proven records of success, and no scandals. Forty years of free books for kids and twenty years of affordable, quality professional development for teachers, and these programs get cut?

Anyway, as I mentioned above, the fight is not over. This bill only funds the government for two weeks. It ends on the 18th of this month. At that point, we will either have another short-term funding bill or a new budget for FY 11. In the meantime, everyone can and should continue to contact our legislators in both the House and Senate, but especially the Senate, where there is currently more support for education.

The Connecticut delegation has been immensely supportive of the National Writing Project. Every January, site directors have to submit a Continued Funding Application. Then, between the submission of that application and the end of March, beginning of April, we lobby for renewal of our funding, which culminates in what is called the Spring Meeting, when site directors and teacher-consultants head to DC to meet with legislators and lobby for continued funding for the NWP. This year, the Spring Meeting is from March 30 till April 1.

Surely many of you have received my many mailings to the CWP listserv requesting calls and letters to legislators. I know it seems annoying at times, but please know that your calls and letters were very successful. I received phone calls or emails from education aides to Senator Blumenthal, and Representatives Courtney, Himes, Larson, and Murphy expressing support for continued funding for the NWP.

That does not mean we should be complacent because we can assume we have the support of the Connecticut delegation. It is still important to let our legislators know how we feel so that they will feel compelled and inspired to lobby their colleagues from other states, who might not be as supportive as they.

Those of you who support the NWP and want to see funding renewed should call or email our senators and your local representative, preferably before the current short-term bill ends on March 18, but certainly before the Spring Meeting at the end of the month.

Senator Blumenthal’s education aide is Jeremy Bratt. His email is jeremy_bratt@blumenthal.senate.gov and his phone number is 202-224-2823.

Senator Lieberman’s education aide is Rachel Sotsky. Her email is rachel_sotsky@lieberman.senate.gov and her phone number is 202-224-4041.

Representative Larson’s education aide is David Sitcovsky. His email is david.sitcovsky@mail.house.gov and his phone number is 202-225-2265.

Representative Courtney’s education aide is John Hollay. His email is john.hollay@mail.house.gov and his phone number is 202-225-2076.

Representative DeLauro’s education aide is Leticia Mederos. Her email is leticia.mederos@mail.house.gov and her phone number is 202-225-3661.

Representative Himes’ education aide is Rachel Kelly. Her email is rachel.kelly@mail.house.gov and her phone number is 202-225-5541.

Representative Murphy’s education aide is Linda Forman. Her email is linda.forman@mail.house.gov and her phone number is 202-225-4476.

Maybe next week I will write about the crazy hate mail I got earlier this week. That was entertaining!

What Kind of Teacher Do You Want To Be?

2011-02-24T14:45:00.002-05:00

I often say to the students in Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers that one of the long-term challenges for them will be learning how to work within an institution without becoming institutionalized. By that, I mean learning to comply with all the bureaucratic requirements that exist in education—federal, state, district, building, department—without losing your passion for teaching after many years of what can be grueling work.

I have a good friend who used to be my assistant principal, and he gave me a left-handed compliment one day when he was dealing with a difficult colleague. He said that all teachers ignore certain rules, which he accepted, but that he was frustrated by teachers who broke rules out of convenience or laziness, and even worse were those who enforced rules erratically or selectively. Then he said to me, ‘You break rules all the time, but I understand that when you ignore a rule it’s for a reason, it’s because that rule contradicts something you believe about teaching.’ I had never thought about it that way, but he was absolutely right.

I give the students the example of tardiness to class. Where I used to work, there was a policy that three tardies were equivalent to an absence, and the burden was on the teachers to keep track of the students’ tardies and enter them into the online attendance system, as well as write office referrals every time a student accumulated a third tardy. I had colleagues who became seconds-counters rather than teachers. They would stand by the doors of their classrooms and tick off the seconds as students arrived, and then they would take several minutes of class time to track each tardy for each late student, count them, enter them, etc.

I never noted anyone’s tardies unless they were egregious, and by that I mean they were disruptive to the class. Otherwise, I didn’t care much. Honestly, it was incredibly rare that I had a student whose occasional (or even frequent) tardiness had any significant impact on anything. I often felt that the teachers who obsessed over tardies created more disruption than the students who were tardy.

So I ask the Advanced Comp students, ‘What kind of teacher do you want to be?’

I suppose I always possessed an attitude like this, but in the early years of my career I tried to conform to rules like the tardy rule, but I hated the teacher I was becoming, one who resented students for being a minute late for class or who got into petty arguments with students over things like using the bathroom or stopping to talk to a friend during passing time, as if these were offenses against the educational process.

I have two siblings almost twenty years younger than me, and my attitude toward my high school students changed when my brother and sister entered high school. Suddenly I saw my students through the prism of my type-A sister and my kind-of-spacey brother, and it personalized my students in significant ways. I just became more relaxed about them and began to learn to treat them more as people than as, well, things in some institution.

I think this challenge—to work in an educational institution without becoming institutionalized, to continue to see your students as people first—has become greater as the field of education has become more bureaucratic. Even classroom teachers, not just administrators, deal with much more administrative-type requirements than ever before, mostly as a result of standardized testing, data collection, and common assessments of both the students and the teachers themselves.

My day yesterday was a stark demonstration of just how polarized my job has become. I began the day in an auditorium filled with faculty members listening to a woman from the Office of Audit, Compliance, and Ethics talk at us for an hour about new rules and regulations, such as those for student and faculty visas, out of state travel, and political activity. We can’t leave these training sessions until the bitter end because we have to sign forms to prove we were in attendance, and of course they withhold these till the end. Imagine the worst professional development day you ever attended, and not even free coffee provided.

From there my day was more normal—a presentation on the Summer Institute to a brown bag discussion group for graduate students, lots of time sending and receiving emails, some reading and writing, and a planning meeting in Hartford at the end of the afternoon. I only teach Tuesdays and Thursdays now, so no teaching.

But then I rushed home from Hartford, called in a pizza order from my cell phone, and picked it up on the way back. My wife is in Spain chaperoning students, and my kids are staying with my mother for the week, so I had dinner at my house for several former students, all seniors who will be graduating in May (or one who graduated already in December). They began arriving around seven and the last ones left around midnight. I fed them pizza. We drank some wine (they are all over 21), and one brought biscotti she made herself.

I told them to bring writing. One young woman just won the Wallace Stevens poetry contest this year, and another is currently taking a creative writing class. The two guys who came are not English majors but they brought their guitars. We read our poetry aloud, myself included, and then the guys played music for a while. They all talked about their plans for next year. One is waiting to hear if she got into a program to teach English in Barcelona. One is applying to MFA programs in creative writing. One just got into medical school and another is considering doctoral programs in clinical psychology.

Listening to this bunch, I thought about my morning being talked at in the compliance training workshop, and couldn’t help but think, ‘This is the teacher I want to be.’

Love Letters

2011-02-16T15:43:00.001-05:00

One of the memorable lines from Dead Poets Society is when John Keating asks, “Language was developed for one endeavor, and that is …?” Student Neil Perry says, “To communicate?” and Keating responds, “No! To woo women!”

The other day, one of my former students said to me that she loves Valentine’s Day because it is the one time of year when she has permission to express her attraction or admiration for every fascinating boy she knows, and so she spent Sunday evening making Valentines, which, on Monday, she handed out to most of the boys in her classes. Four house mates, all recipients of her admiration, were so touched that they pooled together their spare change after having paid their rent and bought groceries to purchase her one rose. She was almost in tears.

It’s amazing to me the effect such small gestures can have, especially the small gesture of a letter or a note. I will admit that I sent out several Valentine’s Day greetings, just a simple “Happy Valentine’s Day” in a text or an email. I received many nice replies. My kids spent Sunday morning making and signing Valentines for classmates, but upon my son’s suggestion (he’s a super sensitive boy) they made several for their teachers, classroom aides, after school caretakers, janitors, nurses, the main office secretaries, the principal, the librarian, and the art and music teachers. I think the classroom teachers are probably accustomed to receiving Valentines, but many of the other teachers and staff members were sincerely touched and surprised by my son’s gesture. (My daughter did inform me, however, that the boys in her class complained about receiving Princess Valentines, though I did not hear of any such complaints from male teachers).

Many years ago now, my wife and I lived on the campus of a boarding school where she worked. She was very fond of one of the English teachers, a man about our parents’ age, whose wife was the head mistress at another boarding school. One year Amy learned that he wrote his wife a poem every year on her birthday, and as soon as she shared that with me I felt stupid that it had never before occurred to me to do the same. So since that time about fifteen years ago, I have always written a poem every year for Amy on her birthday. (I also write poems at other times, as inspired). Nowadays, I also write a birthday poem for each of my kids, my mother, and two former students I have grown very close to. I love the ritual, and I know the recipients love their poems. Though I must admit, this year for my daughter’s fourth birthday I wrote in her poem about how mischievous she can be, and after I finished reading it aloud to her at her family birthday party, she told me it was “a mean note,” and she didn’t love me anymore. I still taped it on her bedroom wall next to last year’s poem.

My high school had a very well established peer counseling program, and during the summer between junior and senior year, those of us who had been selected to be peer counselors and take the peer counseling course spent three or four days on a training retreat. The culminating activity of the training sessions involved the presentation to us of letters written by our parents. The teachers in the program contacted them earlier in the summer, solicited the letters, and swore them to secrecy. This was an all-boys Catholic school with a big athletic tradition, and I still remember how so many of the guys stood around in circles of friends and openly wept after having read these letters, especially the ones from their fathers. I was fortunate to have received letters from not only both parents, but my grandmother, too. My grandmother’s letter was particularly sweet. She imitated Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet XLIII, otherwise known as “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways …”

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

I don’t recall all the lines of my grandmother’s poem, but I do recall one line being about how she loved me for showing kindness to my great-grandmother, who was about 92 at the time, newly moved to a nursing home, and about four years from her death. I think I know where I still have those letters, though I haven’t read them in years.

That grandmother is 87 now, and in somewhat failing health, though her mind is pretty much as sharp as ever. In preparation for the unavoidable day when my grandmother will have to sell her home and move, my mother and step-father have been going through her cellar and attic and culling stuff, donating boxes and boxes of things to the Salvation Army. But in their cleaning, they stumbled upon a box of letters. What was in there were my grandmother’s sisters love letters to and from her husband, and all my great-grandmother’s letters dictated to my grandmother (she was not a confident writer in English) and sent to that same older sister while she was away at college. It was truly a treasure trove of family history. And most of it was written to woo a woman.

Controlled Chaos

2011-02-09T22:50:00.000-05:00

The other day one of my colleagues passed by my office and smiled as she looked in at the controlled chaos that often characterizes my little office suite during the day. She just walked on then, but a day or so later she approached me and commented on what a nice group of students I had assembled in there. I had to recall who had been in there that day.

My graduate assistant Sean was there, as well as the young woman who will be my graduate assistant next year, Laila. She and I were working together to coordinate some high school site visits I will be doing for the Freshman English and Early College Experience programs. And my undergraduate writing intern Sarah was at the computer working on finishing up the very late fall newsletter. Another former student who knows both Sarah and Sean had popped in for a visit, and an advisee had stopped in to have her plan of study signed. It made for a crowded but lively work space.

Today we had a department meeting, which, like department meetings everywhere, was pretty dull. But one of the things we spent a great deal of time on was a revision of the merit review forms. Boring as this it, it is a good thing. The department has revised the forms to award more merit for teaching, administration, service, and outreach—all the kinds of things I do as Writing Project director, more than I produce traditional scholarship, though I do that, too.

There were many general, philosophical questions about the new document, but many of us had self-interested questions, too. One of mine regarded the merit line for advising. Under both the old and the new forms, additional merit points are awarded to anyone who advises fifteen or more undergraduates. With over 800 English majors and about 68 faculty members in the department, the average professor has about twelve advisees, so anyone who takes on a few more than the average is rewarded.

Since I took on the assignment of being the default advisor to the dual degree students in English and Education, I have become inundated with advisees. This is partly because so many of the pre-teaching English majors who are assigned to me will stay with me even though they do not ultimately get into the Neag School of Education, but also because some forty percent of our undergraduate majors will eventually wind up in education on some level, and those who have an inkling of this now want to work with a faculty member who has actually worked in public education at the secondary level.

So anyway, I chimed in at the meeting and asked if it was acceptable on the merit form to write in additional merit points for myself on my self review since I currently had 62 advisees. As soon as I said that, there was a brief hush that came over the room. I think my colleagues thought me crazy to take on so many advisees.

I suppose it is simply indicative of my background as a former high school teacher, but I just really like working with the students. I enjoy meeting with all my advisees, even if it is extremely time consuming. I have days when I need to lock myself in the little office at the back of my office suite to get work done, but generally I really love those days when I have a crowd of students in there working together and talking among themselves. I feel really honored that the students view my office space as some place friendly to them. I wish I had more space for them to spread out, sit down, have a cup of coffee. There aren’t many spaces like that for the students in our building.

Those of you who remember the old CWP offices might recall that the former CLAS one—where I currently am—had a bank of desks and computers along the east wall, and a library with a reading space, and that the director had a separate office across the hallway. That would be a wonderful set up to still have. Even the crowded old space in Arjona had a large conference table in the back by the windows. I don’t recall ever seeing lots of students in that office, and in truth, it was so crowded that the conference table was usually piled high with boxes and binders and books. But I wish I had such a space, because I would use it differently.

The current office for the Freshman English program is a little more like what I would like to see, with meeting space as well as work space and lounge space. It’s a nice area for the graduate students to congregate in, though I don’t see undergrads in there. What I like about the students who socialize in my office is the mix of grad students and undergraduate students, as well as English and Education majors I get.

Hopefully, next year I will be supervising as many as six fifth year students from Neag, students who most likely will have completed their BA in English and BS in Education and who will now be working on their research projects for their MA degrees in Education. I’ll have to find time and space for them to share the office with the regular graduate assistant and undergraduate intern. It will be a challenge, but I welcome the intellectual hustle-bustle of the students.

If only I could knock out the back wall of my office and take over the courtyard that’s outside my window. That would be a nice space, especially in the warm months, for spreading out and letting students mingle among themselves. Just a little cold right now, however.

Vilification at the Expense of Resolution

2011-02-02T21:42:00.000-05:00

So today I sucked it up and called the guy my neighbor uses to plow her driveway. The ice and slush was just too much for me. My blower was just going to get clogged and my turnaround at the end by the garage just has too much surface area. (I still did the neighborhood sidewalk and my elderly neighbors’ driveway by hand, but that’s another issue …). The guy earned about the quickest thirty-five dollars I have ever witnessed—five minutes to push slush to the back of my driveway and leave a layer of mixed mess and lots of other slush around the perimeter.

Anyway, before the guy left he fell into conversation with me. We talked about how all the towns were going to go into debt over their snow removal budgets, and somehow or other that evolved into a conversation about the education budget. It may have had something to do with the fact that the younger guy accompanying him mentioned that he had attended the school down the street where my son goes.

Without getting into all the details, soon I was trying to play tactful diplomat as these two guys went on and on about the lower income people in town (the older of the two men kept referring to them as lower class and then correcting himself). Essentially, they blamed the mostly poor, Spanish-speaking members of the town for all its financial woes. The older of the two also made sure to take a few shots at one of one former first selectmen for having worked with the state to bring various social service agencies to the town.

I had a reaction similar to those I have when I read the local paper blaming teachers on its editorial page. Teachers and the poor are just such easy targets, and scapegoating them avoids dealing with the many complex issues which are much greater than most of us (any of us?) can fully comprehend. The use of local property taxes as the principal means of funding local education is the issue that bothers me the most. But that’s a difficult issue to deal with, and one that has no easy alternatives. It’s so much easier to say that we should fire the teachers and replace them with good ones, or send the poor somewhere else. Are we going to find better teachers somewhere who will be able (and willing) to solve all the myriad problems of educational and financial poverty, and do it for some of the lowest pay in the state? And the poor that this guy would have us expel, where would we send them? Don’t they just become someone else’s problem?

I got a letter in response to my recent article in UConn Magazine about the effect of cuts to education in Windham. In it, the man wrote that he had heard somewhere that in Los Angeles they had put all the good teachers in the bad students’ classes and all the bad teachers in the good students’ classes, and that the good students did just as well and the bad students just as poorly. Now I don’t know where he heard such a story, or why he believed it, but I think his conclusion was that we don’t need to spend lots of money on education or teacher training because the quality of the teachers or the teaching doesn’t matter, and so-called good and bad students are determined (biologically, genetically, socially?) to be the way they are, no matter what. Well then if that’s the case, I guess we just spend the money on snow removal, or whatever the equivalent would be in Los Angeles.

One of the things the snow removal guy blamed the poor and the Spanish-speaking for was the death of the retail shops in downtown Willimantic. I pointed out that the north end of Main Street was actually thriving with businesses, low-end though they might be, and ugly as a result of bad zoning, and that most of the shops on Main Street were actually in business and being run by members of the Spanish American Merchants Association. The Spanish-speaking community was actually keeping downtown in business after so many of the older, more established places had long since either gone out of business or moved out of town. I also pointed out that any further development, meaning a more gentrified type of development with high-end anchor stores, would require that we build parking garages and bring all those nineteenth-century buildings up to code. Both of which would be huge expenditures for some investor, and still there would be the issue of low square footage in all those old buildings.

Those points were brushed off. Zoning and parking and fire codes and square footage are dull subjects, and complicated ones, and not very impassioned. It’s so much more fun to just blame the poor and the recent immigrants. If they just went away, all would be as it was—say in 1960 or 1940 or 1880. But that’s just it. Economic revitalization—of any kind—will take a tremendous financial investment. The same goes for education. You can’t replace the students with better ones any more than you can replace the consumers with better ones; and you can’t replace the teachers with better ones any more than you can replace the business people with better ones.

Sorry, but there’s no way out of either predicament that will come cheap, and honestly, the two problems are intertwined. We can’t expect a Superman, neither Bill Gates nor Barack Obama, to do it all, and no, money in and of itself does not solve problems. But some well made business loans and a few educational grants, whether from public or private sources, would go a long way toward helping to rectify these problems. Blaming the teachers, firing the teachers, blaming the poor and the bilingual, chasing the poor and bilingual to another town, these things only vilify people at the expense of resolution.

Teaching Huck: Elision and Oversimplification

2011-01-27T21:12:00.003-05:00

The most disturbing news to me recently was about the Alan Gribben version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that replaces each of the more than 200 occurrences of the word “nigger” with the word “slave.”

I am disturbed by the decision to publish an edition that elides the word. That said, I am concerned that the book is not taught as well or as effectively as it could be or should be.

We hear a lot about the word nigger and its multiple occurrences in the book. We tend to hear less about Jim’s portrayal, but certainly we could object to his stereotypical and racist depiction.

We also hear typical defenses to these objections—that the use of the racist epithet is an accurate portrayal of language and attitude, and that Huck’s attitudes toward black people is likewise typical.

But I think there is much more complicated stuff going on with this book, and that Twain was much more subtle than he is given credit for (and he is given credit for a lot). This does not mean that Twain was devoid of racist attitudes. I would argue that none of us are devoid of them. Nor do I mean to exonerate Twain for these attitudes just because he helped pay the college tuition of a black man or because Prudence Crandall herself wrote Twain a letter thanking him for all he and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did for the advancement of African-Americans.

I won’t try to cover all the subtleties that I try to bring to the attention of my students when I teach the novel, but I will point out two that I think are extremely important.

One is the early discovery Jim makes that Pap Finn is dead. If you recall, Jim and Huck enter a gambling house that is floating down the river. There has clearly been a fight, and one man has been left dead. Jim does the fatherly thing by telling Huck to step aside and let him inspect the body. He then tells Huck not to look because the face is too “gashly.” At the end of the novel, Jim reveals that the dead man was Huck’s father. My general experience is that this incident is held up as an example of Jim’s fatherly compassion, protecting Huck from a horrific truth. But I think this oversimplifies the plot, and, more importantly, oversimplifies Jim. I tell my students that I think Jim’s decision to conceal the truth of Pap’s death is self-serving and manipulative. That Jim only did this so that he could take advantage of Huck because he needs a white man to help him escape, and since Huck is only fourteen he is easy to manipulate.

This interpretation goes against the grain of the typical interpretation of Jim as a kind, fatherly figure. But I don’t think Twain intended such a simple, stereotypical portrayal of Jim, a portrayal that would be more like that of Uncle Tom from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. If in fact Jim is manipulating Huck in order to help him escape and thereby help him to get his wife and children out of slavery, Jim becomes a much more complex, dynamic character, and so much of his stereotypical behavior can be seen as performative and part of his manipulation of Huck.

Consider what Huck says about the King and the Duke. Huck says that he figured out pretty quickly that the two men were frauds, but that Jim continued to believe they were really a king and a duke. How is it that Huck could see through this charade and Jim could not? Students will often answer that question by pointing out that Jim is ignorant and uneducated, but then so is Huck. If both Jim and Huck are ignorant and uneducated, then why is it that a fourteen year old boy can see through this deception but a thirty-five year old man cannot? Huck assumes Jim cannot see the ruse because Huck is still viewing Jim through a racist lens. When we accept Huck’s explanation, we are experiencing our own racist assumptions. And Twain has just caught us in a web of our own prejudice

The other scene I think is misread is the ending, when Huck paints a comedic resolution to the events of the novel. Tom has his adventure and his bullet. Jim has forty dollars from Tom, and Huck learns that Pap is dead and so therefore he is free. But I always tell students that this is not a happy ending but a tragic one, and that we are witnessing Twain at his ironic best.

Typically, we are told that the comedic resolution lies in the fact that both Huck and Jim learn that they are free. But Huck remains fatherless and Jim’s forty dollars is woefully insufficient to buy his family out of slavery or pay an abolitionist to free them. (Recall that Jim was valued at $800). I ask, if Jim has become a father to Huck and Huck now has no father nor any impediment to his money, why can’t Huck give Jim the money to purchase freedom for his family and why can’t Huck go live with Jim rather than light out for the territories? Because it’s not possible.

All that father-son bonding and the realization on Huck’s part of Jim’s humanity, and in the end Jim is free but his family remains enslaved and Huck is ‘free’ but without a family. Someone will point out that the tenor of the times would prevent the man and the boy from helping each other or living together, and so just like his use of the word nigger, Twain is merely being historically accurate in his portrayal. Which is exactly my point. And that fact should be profoundly more disturbing to readers than the mere occurrence of the word nigger. Likewise, the fact that we continue to portray Jim and the conclusion in such simple terms should disturb us, too.

The Bogeyman

2011-01-19T22:37:00.000-05:00

I feel as though all I have been doing for the last week is shoveling snow, scraping ice, and fixing my snow blower, which broke twice. I had such ice build up at the base of my house along the driveway—a good six inches thick in places—that I had to chop it up with an ax and then shovel it up. Not exactly my idea of a break. Though the Continued Funding Application for the National Writing Project grant pretty much wipes out any semblance of a break for me. I just get a reprieve from students for a month. That said, I was supposed to meet my new students yesterday but snow closed down the university and so I won’t be meeting them till Thursday. I know I don’t have to make up the snow day in June like most of you reading this, but when you only meet your students twenty-eight times, losing a whole class is tough. I’ll have to condense the first two classes into one and make do.

So I spent the day preparing for my first class tomorrow, thinking of ways to combine yesterday’s cancelled class with tomorrow’s class, and when I got home from work I read an editorial by Trudy Rubin that was originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. It’s main argument is that the United States must invest in education because we are currently threatened by the growing militaristic, economic, and educational power of the Chinese. The article goes on to delineate the waning power of the US, the relatively low rank of our students world wide in various categories, and the fact that China will soon have more English speakers and more engineers than the US.

I couldn’t help thinking that I had read some version of this article many times before, only in previous versions disseminated in previous years the threat was posed by the Japanese or, before that, the Soviets. Sometimes the threat is posed by India, which this column also mentioned tangentially.

Not to be too dismissive of the rise of China, but I couldn’t help wondering why we need to invoke a bogeyman to justify a financial investment in education. I kept thinking, Shouldn’t we be investing in education because our students need to be educated, and not because we need to make more money, build bigger fighter jets, and produce more engineers than some other country, any other country? Why do we need to be frightened or provoked into educating our students? Why does a xenophobic argument pass muster as educational policy? Trudy Rubin actually concludes her column by saying that if we don’t begin producing “the best-educated workers,” then “China will roll past us no matter how many missiles we build.”

The other thing that struck me in Rubin’s article is her questionable use of world educational rankings to demonstrate that US students rank far below their peers in other developed nations, and are falling farther—fast. Rubin herself admits that it is difficult if not specious to compare data from US students with data from narrow samples provided by the Chinese government itself. Noting the “questionable” usefulness of this data, she even resorts to relying on her own subjective observations of Asian students in her classes to support her argument, noting that they are her most “driven” students. I kept thinking, let me get this straight: China will roll over us economically because your Korean- and Japanese- and East Asian-American students work hard for their A’s? Not exactly a sound argument, and more than a little troubling for various reasons.

Perhaps instead we should focus on some of the real problems in US education. For one, I bet that if we took the data we use for those national rankings and subdivided it according to race, ethnicity, and other demographic markers we would find very different results. I’m willing to bet that our mostly white suburban students perform as well or better than any students from anywhere in the world, and that our mostly African- and Latin-American urban students perform very poorly. If this is the case, as I think it is, then our focus should not be on producing engineers to roll over the Chinese but on improving education for our African- and Latin-American students, and urban students in general.

To me, the biggest tragedy or impending disaster is not that China might some day have a higher GDP than the US, but that our African-American students, in particular, experience such seemingly intractable problems, that they perpetually receive the lowest quality education, and are so often mired in generational poverty. I am also concerned with Latin- and Southeast Asian-American students. Although it seems to me that many of these students are going through an immigrant experience similar to those encountered by earlier generations of European and East Asian immigrants, and that problems such as low quality education and generational poverty will not last in perpetuity but for only a generation or so, students from these groups clearly struggle with acquiring English language skills, and the training our teachers receive in this area does not adequately address this large and growing need. I think we need to spend more time, money, and effort on English language instruction for these students than Chinese language instruction for our future engineers.

My point here is not to split hairs among ethnic groups, but to take odds with Rubin’s argument. There shouldn’t be a need for such fear-mongering, xenophobic justifications for improved educational funding. And in any rush to improve education for US students, let’s keep our attention on our very real needs, such as urban education, education for African-American students, and ELL instruction. Let’s not worry about how many engineers China is producing, but concentrate on providing better education for all our students. Forget the bogeymen out there and worry about the elephant in the room here among us.

Something to think about as we clear the snow and head into the spring semester.

All I Want For Christmas Is My Profession Back

2010-12-16T22:32:00.001-05:00

I keep thinking about the reform proposals for education floating around right now, and I keep thinking that there are simpler things to be done. Most of the proposals involve sticks and carrots for teachers, the elimination of teachers’ professional rights and privileges—not to mention job security—and the measuring of student performance through narrow assessments that give incomplete pictures and negatively impact teaching.

The documentary Waiting for Superman has made Harlem’s Promise Academy a poster child for many of these reforms, but overlooked by many is the fact that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pours $90 million dollars into the Promise Academy. That’s a lot of money, but that’s nothing compared to the $335 million Gates’ foundation is pouring into the development of teacher evaluation systems, or the $4 billion the federal government is committing to the same cause. Much of this money will never be spent on teaching, however, but on videotaping.

A huge portion of the funds will go to the purchasing of video cameras to be installed in classrooms to tape teachers, and then more will be spent to pay educators (mostly retired administrators) to be trained to assess the tapes in order to collect data for social scientists to be paid to analyze in order to determine best practices in teaching. Much of this will be overseen by ETS, the folks who administer the GREs, Praxis, TOEFL, SATs, and AP tests. As if enough private money doesn’t already go to these folks.

It’s not that I have such a strong objection to these tests. I had to take the Praxis II, and took the GREs twice, and of course took the SAT and AP tests and then for many years prepared students to take both. But it’s frustrating that both the Gates Foundation and the federal government are going to take so many millions and billions of dollars and give it to ETS and other like organizations to do more and more assessment of teaching and learning.

I can’t help but think that, even with all its flaws, if we left the education system alone, if we completely left teaching, tenure, and professional development the way they are, with all their myriad warts, but we took $90 million, or $335 million, or $4 billion dollars and spent it to build new schools, buy more supplies, hire more teachers, pay teachers better, and provide quality professional development, we’d see a sea change in the quality of education.

Don’t get me wrong. Throwing money at problems won’t automatically fix them, and there’d still be many problems in education (we teachers could tell the public this better than any legislator, journalist, or software developer), but just think what you could do in your classes if you had sufficient space and supplies, small classes, dedicated and well paid colleagues, and quality professional development!

Seems to me that the legislators and software developers are putting the cart before the horse here, or perhaps that the testing service lobby has out-lobbied the teachers’ unions. Think about what’s happened. Legislators have forced standardized testing on our students and us, to the degree that it has negatively impacted the quality of education and yet has tied many of our hands with packaged and programmatic curricula and scripted lessons, and then when students don’t do well, we now have standardized assessments imposed on us!

And all this money, money that should be spent paying teachers well to attract the best and brightest to the profession, that should be spent on the hiring of teachers and the building of classroom space to keep class sizes small, that should be spent on effective professional development to keep teachers abreast of current research and practice, is being spent on test booklets, video cameras, and the training of retired educators and other significantly less-qualified individuals to score those tests and evaluate those videos, in order to collect data that will tell us mostly what we already know.

Today is my last blog post of the semester; I’ll resume in mid-January when the spring semester begins at UConn. But with the holidays approaching, I will leave a wish list for Bill and Melinda Gates, Barack Obama, and Arne Duncan.

*Give schools money based on need and not on the degree to which states are willing to penalize teachers and erode their hard-earned rights.

*Compensate teachers like doctors and lawyers. Pay them well in order to attract the best students to the field.

*Treat teachers like professionals. Hire community members to monitor the hallways and cafeterias. Our duty should be teaching, not policing and cleaning.

*Invest in quality professional development in order to provide the best support and training possible. Beware of any so-called educational panacea, especially if its name conveniently makes a witty acronym.

*Build schools that are clean, well-lighted, and adequate to the physical needs of the students. No more overcrowded classrooms, converted janitors’ closets, and portables.

*Purchase enough computers, books, and supplies so that there are no more laptop carts, photocopied texts, and bake sales.

*Make the assessment of students and the evaluation of teachers holistic and comprehensive. And allow classroom teachers to design these assessments and perform these evaluations rather than politicians, journalists, software designers, retired administrators, and stay-at-home moms in Texas.

*Stick the video cameras in the corporate boardrooms and legislative offices, and let the teachers assess and evaluate the best practices of those folks. This might be pretty educational for us all.

Well, that’s my somewhat Grinchy Christmas rant. I do hope everyone has nice holidays and time off from school. I will be free of students for several weeks—more time than most of you—but I will be writing two book reviews and giving a book talk (which I will enjoy a lot), delivering some professional development (which I will enjoy a little), and completing the Continued Funding Application for the NWP grant (which I will enjoy about as much as going to the dentist).

I’ll see you in January!

Do You Know Who I Am?

2010-12-08T22:49:00.000-05:00

I remember when I was an undergraduate student there was an urban legend about a student taking an exam in a big lecture class. The story went that the professor announced when time was up, but this one student continued to write. The professor announced again and again that time was up, getting more angry each time, but the student continued to write. Finally, the professor approached the student, asking “Who do you think you are?” The student rose and responded, “Do you know who I am? Do you?” Surprised, the professor said, “No, young man, I have no idea who you are!” The student replied, “Good!” and then stuffed his blue book randomly into the middle of the stack of blue books, and ran out of the lecture hall.

Years later I thought of this story in a research methods course I took at Humboldt State, as part of my MA program. We had this smart but rather mousy, old fashioned professor who just lectured to us from behind a podium. On the last day of class, he was handing back our term papers, and as he called out our names it was immediately apparent that he didn’t have any idea who any of us were. I was shocked that a professor could have a class of students for fifteen weeks and fail to learn any of our names.

I have always tried to get to know my students. And I don’t mean just learn their names. Names are easy. I have the students introduce themselves to one another on the first day of class, and then I go around the room and say all their names. Perhaps it is a sad commentary on education in higher ed in particular, but the students are always amazed that I can learn their names so quickly.

In office hours during the paper conferences I require, I always make a point of asking where students grew up, where they went to school, whether they have siblings, what they do for work or play. I often find that I know one or more of their high school teachers, or even that we have a mutual friend or acquaintance.

One year I had a young woman who told me she grew up in Hamden. I asked her to name her first grade teacher, and she said, “Mrs. Zito.” I smiled and asked her if I could use her cell phone for a second. (I didn’t have one at that time). She smiled oddly but gave it to me. I dialed my mother on my student’s phone, and when she picked up I asked her if she remembered the student, and of course she did, and so I put them on the phone together. Zito is my mother’s surname by her second marriage, and she taught mostly first grade in Hamden for thirty-six years.

This semester I have three students who went to school with my siblings. (My half-brother and half-sister are half my age). Two young men went to elementary school in Hamden with both my siblings, and one young woman went to high school in Guilford with just my sister.

The other thing I really like to see, and that I sort of pride myself on, is that my students really get to know each another. One thing I do at the beginning of the year is require them to participate in discussion without raising their hands for me to call on them and without using me as an intermediary. I tell them that they are all mature enough to respond politely and respectfully to one another without interrupting and without getting my permission. And I tell them that when they respond to a classmate’s comment, they have to respond to him or her by name. It is awkward at first, but quickly they learn one another’s names and soon the practice is standard and familiar for our class.

By now, I see all sorts of friendships and relationships that have begun in my class. There’s at least one relationship that I have watched emerge this semester, and many friendships that have developed, particularly from the response groups they are required to work in every third class.

I know friendships and relationships would and do emerge from any class, and so I’m not trying to take all the credit here, but I do think that my efforts to get to know my students and to require them to learn (and use!) one another’s names, and then to work together frequently in small groups, fosters friendships and relationships. And it’s nice at the end of the semester to watch the students leaving class in small groups of new friends. To me, these relationships are at least as important as the books and the essays.

What I Did For My Thanksgiving Break

2010-12-01T22:18:00.004-05:00

I took off two weeks from the blog because I was in Orlando for the National Writing Project Annual Meeting and National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention, and then it was Thanksgiving and I was busy driving to Pennsylvania and then to Boston.

I brought three veteran teachers, one first year teacher, and a graduate student with me to Orlando. We all had a great time and met up with lots of other UConn colleagues—some professors and many teachers newly graduated from the School of Education. I was on three panels on Thursday, one for State and Regional Writing Project Networks, one for Writing Center Collaborations, and one for the Writing Project Site Early History Project.

At the SRN panel, I got to share all the work Jane Cook and I (mostly Jane) have done on the CWP website over the last few years, particularly showcasing the work we did for last April’s New England Writing Projects Annual Meeting that we hosted in Storrs.

At the Writing Center panel, Jane and Denise Abercrombie got to share all their hard work and the success they have had establishing and running writing centers at Windham Middle School and EO Smith High School, and Kaylee Czajka and Jessica Cullen, last year’s and this year’s graduate assistants in charge of the writing center collaboration, got to talk about running the training and support aspects of the collaboration, like the now-annual fall conference.

That panel was a huge success, and toward the end of the day we learned that UConn’s Writing Center had just received a CCCC Certificate of Excellence, in part for their work on public school outreach. If you want to learn a little more about the Writing Center’s outreach program, go here: Writing Center Outreach.

For the Early History Panel, I got to share all the discoveries I made with the help of my last two writing interns, Ben Miller and Jessica Mihaleas, about the CWP’s direct involvement in and funding of Writing UConn, which became the Long River Review, and the Graduate Student Training Seminar Journal, which was the precursor to Essay Connections, which publishes award winning Graduate Student Critical Essays, Freshman English Essays, and now Writing in the Disciplines essays.

On the pages of the old journals from the 1980s, I found the names of all sorts of now-notable and well known writers, teachers, and professors, folks like the author Wally Lamb and former Connecticut State Troubadour Hugh Blumenfeld. Jessica put together a nice display of select volumes for this year’s Aetna Awards Night, and I shared her write-ups and some photos.

On Friday I was invited to a book launch panel for What Is ‘College-Level’ Writing? Volume 2, which includes on its companion website an article by me, eight TCs (mostly from the 2007 Summer Institute) and one former student, Lindsay Larsen, who’s student teaching in Colchester now and who also has her own single-authored piece in the print edition. The session was much more than a publication party. The room was literally standing room only, all high school teachers and community college and university professors.

Each of the three editors spoke briefly, and then all the contributors who were present got to say a little something about our chapters, and then it became an open forum with lots of great discussion. I have almost finished re-reading the book, and I really like the volume. You can read the article I was the lead author for at the companion website here: Companion Website.

Shortly after returning home, just after the Thanksgiving holiday, in fact, I received my copy of UConn Magazine, which includes an article by me I worked on throughout last year. It’s about public education in general, but it is specifically about how underfunding has damaged public education, and uses my son’s school as an example. I have written about this topic and about my son’s school in this blog at various times, but to see the complete article you can go here: UConn Magazine.

My original draft of the article was almost three times as long, and included much more disturbing information that I couldn’t include because I couldn’t get any administrators to confirm what some classroom teachers had alleged, but I had space constraints anyway, so I had to cut it short.

My good friend Patti, who is the director of University Communications, warned me that my article might cause some controversy, and in fact the morning after the print version arrived in mailboxes, I got my first phone call to my home from an angry neighbor who started to yell at me “as a neighbor and a tax payer,” and who was deeply offended when I told him that I did not consider it appropriate for him to call me at home. I told him that if he would contact me at my office email of phone number I would gladly speak with him, but then he became verbally abusive and I had to hang up the phone. He never called my office, though I gave him the number.

Later, when I walked my son to school, one of the classroom aides stopped me in the hallway and thanked me for the article, and that made up for the disgruntled neighbor on the phone.

A couple days after, once the article went up online, I posted a link to it on my facebook wall, and marveled at the wonders of social networking, as I received wallposts from many teachers and TCs, several professors from my department, a couple of local community college professors, current graduate students, former grad school colleagues (including one from my MA program in California), current undergraduate students of mine, former undergraduate students of mine, former high school students of mine, a couple of local writers who work a lot with the CWP, an old college friend who marveled at how much I have cleaned up and straightened out—and my mother (who is a retired teacher). All in all, very cool.

Give Me a Break

2010-11-10T15:04:00.002-05:00

Just as it did with the education budget in Windham last spring, the Willimantic Chronicle ran a piece on their opinion page last Friday that sought to undermine teachers. In both cases the piece ran just before a vote on or a passage of a budget matter. This time the Chronicle ran a Community Voices article by Columbia First Selectman Carmen Vance urging voters in Columbia to prevent the approval of a new contract for teachers, fairly negotiated and agreed upon by the teachers’ union and the school board.

Vance made all the usual specious arguments teachers hear all the time: teachers only work ten months out of the year, teachers only work 185 days out of the year, teachers only work 7.2 hours a day “with [a] 30 minute lunch, one planning period a day, one team planning period a week and one planning period a week of they are working on some type of special project.” Vance then lists myriad benefits, such as personal and professional days, but makes sure to throw in every possible additional type of leave, such as maternity, personal injury, and sabbaticals, creating the appearance that teachers typically cash in on all these days, and so significantly reduce the number of actual working days.

She also makes the claim that general wage increases when coupled with step increases will benefit some teachers with “as much as a 24 percent increase [in salary], if not more, over the three years of the contract.”

I know I’m mostly preaching to the choir in this column, but honestly, though many of us can name a teacher or two we know who arrives to work last minute and leaves before the buses and who takes every sick day possible, those teachers just are not the norm. How many of you will spend Thanksgiving seated in the other room grading quizzes? How many of you will collect term papers right before February break so you can spend your so-called vacation reading, commenting on, and grading those papers? When’s the last time one of you took a sabbatical? And best of all, does anyone know anyone in the profession whose salary jumped 24 percent in three years?

I can only imagine that Vance performed some sort of improbable, hypothetical calculation in which some imaginary teacher hit the top step and somehow managed to complete a sixth-year degree or an 092 certification, or something along those lines, in the period covered by the contract, and thus propelled him- or herself to the absolute top of the pay scale. It’s just one of those things that won’t happen, and he must know it. I’d challenge her to name the teacher she has in mind, highly suspecting she cannot, but I would not want to establish the precedent of publishing teachers’ names in such a context. One need look no further than what happened recently in Los Angeles, where the LA Times has been publishing the value-added evaluations of teacher performance, and one popular teacher became depressed and subsequently committed suicide after a rating of “less effective than average” was posted in the Times. I hate to say it, but I knew something like this was going to happen eventually.

The point Vance concludes with is that “seniors on fixed incomes” living in Columbia can’t afford the tax increase that would result from the new contract. She doesn’t say how much more the average tax payer would pay annually. Nonetheless, Vance’s conclusion reveals a bigger issue, and that is education funding. Simply put, we shouldn’t be funding local education through property taxes. The state and federal government should be providing much more direct and equitable funding of education. Vance is attacking the wrong opponent, and in the process joining the likes of the Willimantic Chronicle and, in an extreme example, the LA Times, in demonizing and vilifying teachers, creating a hostile environment that contributes to a loss of respect, the deterioration of morale, and the loss of interest in entering or remaining in the profession. Honestly, I have been in education for twenty years this year, and am from a family of teachers, and I have never seen morale so low. My family members haven’t seen morale this low since the strikes that occurred in the 1970s, before the educational enhancement acts were passed in the 1980s.

In conclusion, Vance says, “in these economic times taxpayers need a break.” How about this one: In these economic times, education needs investment and teachers need support.

Conscience, Politics, and the Classroom

2010-11-03T13:54:00.002-04:00

I offended a student yesterday in class. We were discussing Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The novel is a modern-day version of a slave narrative, purportedly written by a woman trapped as a sexual handmaid to a government official in a futuristic, dystopian society. The back story is that social unrest and civil war have allowed a socially- and religiously conservative theocracy to take hold in Northern New England. Due to low birth rates among whites, women with viable ovaries have been captured and sent to re-education camps where they are brainwashed and then sent to become handmaids to the Commanders in charge of this theocracy. They are forced to submit to ritualized rape. Justification comes from the Biblical story of Jacob and Rachel in Genesis 29, in which Jacob conceives a child by Rachel’s handmaid Bilah when Rachel proves infertile.

The novel was published during the Reagan administration and was intended to critique the Right Wing and the influence of Evangelical Christianity upon the Republican party. The Commander’s wife Serena Joy is a take on Tammy Faye Bakker, right down to the running mascara when she cries on camera. The handmaid recalls seeing her on TV, campaigning for a return to traditional social values and family structures. She observes that Serena Joy did not uphold these values herself, being a public figure and traveling to campaign, and also notes that once the theocracy was in place, Serena Joy was forced to live the life she campaigned for—and hated it.

I mentioned the similarity to Tammy Faye to my students, but no one knew who she was. I gave a quick explanation. Then I tried to make a connection to contemporary politics by pointing out the coincidence that we were discussing this book on election day, and that we currently had a Republican woman running for senator. I said something to the effect that Linda McMahon was a highly successful woman who had become the nominee of a party that, if it had its way, would roll back women’s rights.

Now I know this isn’t necessarily true of McMahon. Much as I opposed her election, she is a New England Republican, which is a different breed of Republican, tending to be fiscally conservative but socially moderate. McMahon herself supports basic reproductive rights for women and the rights of states to make their own determination on gay marriage.

For the most part, the students seemed too disinterested in contemporary politics to know or say much about the subject. However, one girl in my class just up and walked out. As one boy said to me after class, “Man, that chick just jetted after you dissed McMahon.” Yes, she did.

I worried all day about this girl and whether or not I offended her. I don’t think there is anything wrong with a professor (or a secondary teacher, for that matter) expressing his or her political opinions. The only objection would be if students were rewarded or penalized depending on whether or not they shared the instructor’s opinions. Otherwise, sharing your opinions might be better, more honest and transparent. I’ve certainly had students who were much more politically conservative than I am who did very well in my courses, and in a couple of instances when students have done poorly in a class and attempted to complain that they did poorly because I didn’t like them or something like that, I could point to those students who did well regardless of their very different political and/or religious outlooks.

Nonetheless, I hate having upset a student, even if it may be the case that she overreacted. The first book we read this semester was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and I found myself thinking about Huck’s ironic struggles with his conscience throughout the novel. At one point, Huck says, “It don’t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person’s conscience ain’t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn’t know nomore than a person’s conscience does, I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person’s insides, and yet ain’t no good, nohow.”

I wouldn’t say I feel bad about what I said, or that I would have said something different if I had the chance for a do-over. I guess I wish the girl had just challenged me and sparked a good discussion in class. That wouldn’t have pricked my conscience at all.

Writing UConn

2010-10-27T14:20:00.003-04:00

In the late 80s when the Aetna Endowment and the Aetna Chair of Writing were established in the English Department at UConn, the state legislature named the Connecticut Writing Project a Center for Excellence, a title that was used for many years for marketing purposes but eventually fell into disuse. Being a Center for Excellence is not the same as being a University Academic Center such as the UConn Writing Center, but somehow the similar titles caused confusion, and so at the end of the Spring semester in 2009 I received an email from our Provost’s Office informing me that I had to conduct a five-year program review of the CWP in order for it to be reauthorized as an academic center. Worse, the email said that if no previous review had been performed, the new review had to cover the program since its inception. For us, that was 1982. To make a long story short, I complied, spending most of my so-called August vacation producing a concise but thorough 22-page document. When I proudly submitted this to the provost’s office that fall, I was informed that I never should have had to conduct a review because the CWP was not an academic center.

Such is bureaucracy.

But all was not lost. The silver lining is that the data I collected taught me a tremendous amount about my own program. Furthermore, the National Writing Project celebrated its 35th anniversary in 2009, and as part of their anniversary celebration, they initiated the Site Early History Project, which is an effort to collect personal narratives and data from the oldest of the 209 NWP sites around the country, particularly those that can trace their histories to the years prior to the arrival of federal funding in 1991. Along with the New York and Boston sites, the CWP at UConn is one of the oldest sites in the northeast, and we will be celebrating our 30th anniversary next year. At this year’s Annual Meeting, I’ll be participating in a panel titled Study the History of Your Site or State Network.

Last fall, to supplement the research I had already done, I asked my undergraduate writing intern Ben Miller to begin collecting narratives from Teacher Consultants, particularly from the 1980s. I have asked this year’s intern, Jessica Mihaleas, to continue this work, but I also asked her to begin another project that built upon some of the discoveries I made writing my ill-fated program review.

One of the questions on the guidelines the Provost’s Office sent me asked to catalogue the research and publications produced by our Center. Now the CWP does not produce traditional academic scholarship, but we have always published the writing and research of teachers, and I had dozens of old journals lining the shelves of my office that I had never even looked at. When I began wading through these, I made all sorts of discoveries.

Of course I had copies of every issue of Connecticut Student Writers going back to 1982. Some from the earliest years listed former high school English teacher and author Wally Lamb as one of the readers and editors. I also found chapbooks of teacher writing from every Summer Institute, as well as from the Summer Institutes held at UConn-Stamford before that site spun off and went to Fairfield University. But I also found Teaching Assistants Training Seminar journals from 1986-1988. Unbeknownst to me, the CWP had provided some of the training for the English graduate students preparing to teach Freshman English, and had also published their writing, as has always been done with the Summer Institute TCs. I even found writing by both of the grad assistants who taught my English 105 and 109 classes in 1987-88.

I also found all the old copies of Writing UConn, the predecessor of the now-nationally acclaimed undergraduate literary magazine Long River Review, dating back to 1983. Within these I discovered writing by Jon Andersen, Denise Abercrombie, and Ken Cormier, to name a few, from their undergraduate years. All are good friends of mine and all are veteran teachers at this point, and Jon and Denise have both completed the Summer Institute in recent years.

So I put Jessica to work cataloguing these publications, and a snapshot of Jessica’s work can be viewed in a display case in the lobby of the Dodd Center. It documents the interrelationships among the CWP, the Aetna Chair of Writing, the Freshman English Program, the University Writing Center, and the Creative Writing Program to publish the writing of public school teachers, K-12 students, undergraduate students, and graduate students in publications such as Writing UConn, the Long River Review, Connecticut Student Writers, Teacher, Writer, and Essay Connections, as well as in the various short-lived and unnamed journals that published teacher research or the creative writing of the graduate students training to teach Freshman English.

I should also point out that the four writing programs in the English Department, with the participation of the Aetna Chair of Writing, have recently launched a new web portal page for our programs that can be found at www.writing.uconn.edu. Right now this portal is little more than just that—a portal. But as we move forward, we plan to add links to information, and to maybe digitize the old publications from the 1980s and 1990s so that they can be downloaded or viewed as pdfs.

I hope to see some of you tomorrow night at the Aetna Awards.

Making Writing and Literature Contemporary

2010-10-20T22:04:00.002-04:00

Every fall I teach a section of an American Literature survey course. I always tweak the writing assignments, but for several years I have been giving a version of the same assignment. Students have to use one or more of the texts from the course as lenses through which to view and interpret a contemporary ‘text,’ which I define broadly to include any current book, film, television series, political or cultural event or figure. Students have the option of writing two, seven-page essays, one due at midterm and the other at the final, or of working throughout the semester on one fifteen page essay. About a third of my current twenty students have chosen the fifteen page option.

Students must do research on their contemporary text, which can involve reading news articles or watching sitcoms, depending on the nature of the text they choose, and they must draft. There are four response group sessions and two teacher conferences in each half of the semester, which amounts to roughly one draft a week in a fourteen week semester.

Because it is a survey course, I like to focus on a theme for the readings. This fall it is Evil in American Literature. This year I mixed canonical works with several other works, including four I have never taught before. Chronologically, the students read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Sanctuary, A Streetcar Named Desire, Howl, Interview with the Vampire, The Handmaid’s Tale, Beloved, and No Country For Old Men. By now they have read the first four and are just completing Interview, so most of the papers thus far are only on those texts.

I am about halfway through reading the midterm papers. Almost half of them are on Huck Finn, but several are on Streetcar or Sanctuary, and two students even read ahead in order to write about The Handmaid’s Tale.

I have read comparisons of Huck Finn to Harry Potter, Forrest Gump, Everett Ulysses McGill from O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the unnamed protagonist from Fight Club, Dito Montiel from A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Keith Frazer from Inside Man, and to the characters from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”

I have also read comparisons of Blanche DuBois and Snooki, Temple Drake and Paris Hilton, and Stanley Kowalski and Hank Moody from Californication. Sanctuary has proven a widely applicable book, being compared to films like The Shining, graphic novels like Black Hole, and traditional short stories like Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

But my favorites so far are one that discusses Sanctuary and the infamous Glen Ridge rape case of 1989, one that discusses Sarah Palin and the Conservative Feminism movement in light of The Handmaid’s Tale, Streetcar, and Sanctuary, one that discusses the history of religious intolerance in America with special attention to the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, as seen through the lens of Huck Finn, and two others.

One is on Mao’s Proletarian Re-education Movement and both Streetcar and The Handmaid’s Tale. This one is being written by a first generation Chinese-American student who conducted personal interviews by phone of her parents and another close family friend who were among the educated urban youth who were sent by Mao to the countryside to work with the peasants.

The last is by one of my advisees, a young woman studying to be a high school English teacher, who chose to write about teaching Huck Finn, and has focused on the 2007 challenge to the book that took place at Manchester High School. My student has interviewed Education Program Director Craig Hotchkiss of the Mark Twain House and Museum, and will be interviewing one of the English teachers from the high school who was embroiled in the challenge. She will also be accompanying me to a one-day symposium on Mark Twain taking place next month at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford.

I point out all this in part because I am excited about my students and the papers they are writing, but also because this is a survey course, open to sophomores and populated mostly by non-English majors, yet the students take this assignment very seriously and write very good papers. I think this happens because I ask them to write about subjects that are of interest to them. Many, like the students writing these last two papers that I highlighted, go far beyond the requirements of the assignment and pursue research that is personally or professionally transformative. To me, that’s the greatest success.

The Merits of Advising

2010-10-13T22:09:00.001-04:00

This week and next is advising at UConn, when all the students have to sign up for twenty minute slots to meet their advisors to plan their schedules for next semester. If you went to UConn back in the day like I did, you might remember forging signatures on add/drop cards and standing in line in the ROTC hangar to register. Seems like such a madhouse now. I rarely met with my advisor. I had a professor I was friendly with who showed me how to forge his signature so I could expedite registration.

The students can’t do that now. Now, everything is computerized. There are electronic holds that prevent students from using the online registration system if they haven’t paid their fee bill or if they haven’t met with their advisor. And each student is assigned a pick day when they can actually log into the system and register. It’s still a madhouse, but without all the students being herded into one small building.

There are over 800 English majors and sixty-eight professors, so that comes to around twelve advisees per professor. If we take on more than fifteen advisees the merit committee awards extra merit. I have fifty-five as of today—all the dual degree students in English and Education plus all the English majors who haven’t applied to the School of Education yet.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining (well, maybe about the fact that a professor with sixteen advisees qualifies for the same merit as me with my fifty-five). I find the advising period hectic and exhausting, but I really enjoy meeting all my students. I have so many interesting advisees. Lots of students in the honors program, students studying abroad in London and Dublin, students double-majoring for their Liberal Arts degree. I spoke with a young woman this afternoon who is double-majoring in English and Spanish for her Liberal Arts degree with an IB/M in Elementary Education. I thought that was very cool.

I’ve also been very impressed by the students who did not get into Neag but who stayed with me for advising for an English degree. Most—maybe all—of them are planning to apply to the Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates at the West Hartford or Waterbury branches. (Back in the day, I did that program before it was a degree program. Now it is a very intensive and rigorous one-year MA program). But now that they are free of the forty, forty-two, or fifty credits they would have to take as Secondary English, Elementary, or Special Education students, they can do all sorts of cool things with their degree to make themselves good candidates for graduate school in Education. One young woman I met with Tuesday is working on a Certificate in Teaching English from the English Department, a concentration in Criminology, and a minor in Psychology. Another I met with on Monday is working on both the Concentration in Teaching English and the Concentration in Creative Writing. (She will have about forty-eight credits in English, not counting the introduction to Creative Writing prerequisite. For a degree, you only need thirty). Plus she is pursuing a concentration in Women’s Studies.

The other thing I love about advising is talking to the students about their lives. It’s not something encouraged or discussed much within the department, and I know that many if not most of my colleagues avoid it, but I really embrace being an adult mentor to the students. I enjoy getting to know the students and talking to them about themselves, not just about the courses they want to register for. Just this week I had one young man who came to talk about his struggles adjusting to UConn as a transfer student. Two days later, another student opened up to me about struggling with depression. I also had a former high school student come sign up to be my advisee. She went a little astray in life and has just now returned to college after a few wayward years and two years at a community college.

The lives and transcripts of these three students aren’t as neat and tidy and professional-looking as those of most of my advisees, but I relish being able to help and guide these students, too. I feel honored that they come to me, and I am happy when I can help them. To me, that’s much more meaningful than scholarship—even if the merit review committee doesn’t really give a damn.

It's Not About Effort

2010-10-06T15:06:00.001-04:00

This week I wanted to address the issues I brought up last week, but I can’t ignore this morning’s lead editorial in the Willimantic Chronicle: “Some teachers deserve to go.” (I only momentarily pause to point out that the editorial wasn’t written by anyone on the Chronicle’s editorial staff, but was taken from a wire service).

Anyway, the argument I keep encountering regarding evaluation of teachers and merit pay rests upon the assumption that the teachers don’t work hard enough. The Chronicle editorial criticizes “bad teachers who wear tenure like a badge of honor.” Last week Rick Green at The Hartford Courant responded to a Vanderbilt University study that demonstrated conclusively that merit pay has no measurable benefit on student performance on standardized tests. Green dismissed the results of the study with a single stroke, saying that we need to look “deeper” at the study to draw the correct conclusions. His column then renews the call for merit pay, and concludes by saying “we can no longer ignore hard work.” Once again, everything comes down to the same basic assumption that teachers are lazy and don’t work hard enough, that they deliberately take advantage of their tenure to work as little as possible and continue to draw a pay check.

As I made clear in my column last week, we all know colleagues who don’t haul their weight, and we can all think of a teacher or two we would love to see ride off into the sunset or go do something like cut and paste syndicated editorials into a column for a small, local paper. But these teachers are not the norm, and we know it. While we’d all love to see these teachers go and we’d all love to make a little more money, there are four problems that aren’t being adequately or accurately addressed in the Chronicle’s editorials and Rick Green’s columns.

First and foremost, change is not going to happen without money. I was at a local fundraising event a few weeks ago talking to a local politician who is a neighbor and acquaintance of mine, and he made it very clear that he wants to improve student performance in Windham without spending a penny. He believes that a restructuring of schools would do the trick. He was mainly thinking about longer days and longer years. Longer days and longer years would increase instructional time, but this would be impossible without more money. Even if you could strong-arm the local union into a contract that increased its teachers’ hours and days without a pay increase, just the cost of heating, cooling, electricity, and insurance would increase costs.

Second, test and punish doesn’t work for students, teachers, or schools. Sadly, the dominant model of assessment being imposed upon all levels of education is punitive. Students don’t pass CAPT and they don’t graduate—even if they have met all other graduation requirements. Teachers don’t get CAPT and CMT scores to rise and they lose their merit pay or their jobs. Schools don’t attain Adequate Yearly Progress and they are shut down, or the administrators are fired, or the kids are sent to other schools. What students, teachers, and schools need is not punishment but support. Take a system like Windham’s where approximately fifty percent of the students are bilingual or English Language Learners. Most of the teachers in the district are not trained to teach bilingual or ELL students. They would benefit tremendously from quality professional development in this area. By and large these are good teachers who lack specific training. Training is available, but again, it will cost money, and we are back to point one. We know that money for PD is one of the first things to go in budget cuts. I got a call from a superintendent last year who asked me for two or three days of PD for just his high school English teachers, but he had only $7000 to spend over a two year period for all PD for the entire district. I know at my wife’s school the department heads are often just told to run PD for their department members, an additional expectation just lumped into the department chairs’ duties without any additional compensation. But at least they have department heads. The school I mentioned before lost those, too.

Third, in order to eliminate ineffective teachers and/or provide the necessary training and support for teachers, administrators or veteran teachers need to be able to perform extensive observations and evaluations in order to collect data and provide feedback. But this presents all sorts of challenges. For one, we need administrators with training in the different content areas. A former phys ed teacher should not be evaluating an English teacher. A former English teacher should not be evaluating a math teacher. Using veteran teachers or department heads makes sense, but then you have to remove these folks from their classrooms. Many schools still only reduce a department head’s teaching load by a class or two. How then can they be available to conduct sufficient observations? We would need non-teaching department heads and/or administrators who only conducted observations. And that is going to cost money. Back to point one.

Fourth, standardized tests like the CMTs and CAPT are insufficient measures of learning and teaching. Take the CAPT Response to Literature. It measures students’ ability to read and interpret a short story. But long fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama are completely neglected, as is the ability to draft and revise a piece of writing. No test evaluates that—not SAT, AP, CMT, or CAPT. Never mind that world languages, art, health, and many other subject areas aren’t evaluated at all. We need to look at varied indicators of quality teaching and student learning, such as graduation rates, college acceptance rates, and perhaps a large scale, portfolio-style senior project. In fact, the original proposal for CAPT looked a lot like this, but was deemed too cumbersome, subjective, and expensive to assess. Such a comprehensive set of assessment measurements would involve more people and more time, and thus more money. Point one again.

In sum, you can’t get blood from a stone. If the public, the legislature, and the press want to attract qualified teachers; improve instruction; improve student learning; evaluate, support, and—when necessary—remove teachers, no matter how you look at it, more money is necessary. It’s not about effort. We’re mostly killing ourselves trying to do the best job we can. What we need is more support and less vitriol and scapegoating.

Fear of Superman

2010-09-29T22:40:00.006-04:00

The other day I forwarded a message to the CWP listserv about the release of the documentary Waiting for Superman, which came out on the 24th. I haven’t seen the movie yet but all the buzz is that it is highly critical of education in the United States. There’s a couple of lengthy articles about the film and about education in general in the September 20 issue of Time. The email I forwarded came to me from a colleague in the Neag School of Education, and it had gone out to several listservs for students.

Within minutes of my forward I received an email from a colleague who demanded to know if I was endorsing this biased film. I answered that I was simply forwarding information, but the angry tone of the email struck me. I thought, why was there so much anger and even fear implicit in this email? This was especially notable because the original email I received about the film’s release lacked any sense of panic or anger. It was, in fact, rather upbeat and encouraged the undergraduate education students to go see the film. Why the stark contrast?

Something occurred to me right away. One of the Time articles makes a point about the film’s strong criticism of schools of education and the poor job they do preparing students to become teachers. But I think my colleague in Neag probably feels, as I do, that those criticisms by and large do not apply to Neag, which does an exceptional job of educating and preparing teachers. For instance, the article states that “we hire lots of our lowest performers to teach, and then we scream when our kids don’t excel.” It cites one study which concludes that “just 23% of new teachers in the U.S. come from the top third of their college classes; 47% come from the bottom third.” But at least at UConn, this isn’t the case at all. Not even close.

The competition to get into Neag is tremendous, and dozens of applicants are rejected every year. The twelve to fifteen students who are admitted into the Secondary English cohort each year have better than a 3.8 GPA on average, and Dean’s List in the School of Ed is around a 4.0. When I meet my advisees, it’s not uncommon for them to be in the honors program, to be working on a double major for their Liberal Arts degree, to be studying abroad, or to be pursuing a minor—all in addition to their dual degree and integrated bachelors/masters. And they all took AP or UConn English in high school.

So the more I thought about it, the more I really respected my colleague’s lack of fear or panic about the release of this film, because the film’s criticism of teacher education programs does not apply to the students coming out of UConn. So why go on the defensive?

One image from the film that was focused on by one of the Time writers was of a teacher reading the newspaper at his desk while his class did nothing. A terrible image of teachers, yes, but this was not a fictionalized image. It was a real teacher really neglecting his class. And honestly, haven’t we all known a few teachers like this in our careers? I remember one from my student teaching who did exactly that. It was at an alternative high school, and one of the only times the superintendent in the district ever bothered to cross the threshold of the building, he was greeted by the students in this man’s classroom literally hanging out the open second story window and throwing paper airplanes. The superintendent rushed up to the room, thinking there was no teacher in there, only to find him with his nose in the paper and his feet on the desk. Of course I could cite other examples, but one is sufficient. You get the picture, and you’ve all known those teachers. They give us and our profession a bad name. They aren’t the norm, at least not in the schools I have worked in, visited, and observed. Not by a long shot. But they exist, and pretending they don’t doesn’t help our cause.

To me, we need to have an honest dialogue with the public and the politicians. People need to know that we don’t condone this sort of teaching (if you can call it that) but they also need to know that it is not the norm in our state. The perception that it is the norm is part of what’s behind the drive to eliminate tenure and push for an observation and evaluation process that is more punitive than supportive.

I say that most of us know what we need and what schools need. Good schools of education like Neag are doing an excellent job training future teachers, but the reality in the trenches can undo even the most prepared teachers. My wife just completed a NEASC accreditation visit to a very troubled school. She told me how she saw superb teaching but she also saw some downright awful teaching—or just the lack of teaching, teachers who just handed out worksheets and were content if kids slept or listened to music just so long as they didn’t cause any disruptions. One third-year teacher broke down crying when he talked to the teachers on the site visit as he described the awful working conditions and the low morale at the school. He told them point blank he knew he couldn’t stay at the school much longer, even though he loved the kids. How do we retain a guy with this level of passion? It's not his education that failed him.

Next week I will tackle some of the questions implicit and explicit in this week’s column, and I’ll begin with a local politician friend of mine who wants to reform education here in my home town--without spending an extra cent. This and other fairy tales next week.

The best thing is when you close your door and it’s just you and your kids

2010-09-23T23:49:00.003-04:00

I had many good and bad experiences with education this week.

This morning was some of the bad—an annual 504 review for my son which involved a lot of stonewalling and foot dragging, and a lack of transparency, on the part of the administrators at his school. Fortunately, because my wife and I are both educators, we possessed the knowledge to be able to compel these colleagues of ours to be more proactive in their response to our son’s educational needs. We were able to demand alternate tests to the DRA, insist that moving up a grade level for reading was legal when it was suggested it might not be, and that sort of thing. Once we started throwing around familiar acronyms like RTI and DI, suddenly the other teachers in the conference room sat up and paid attention. Unfortunately, I walked away somewhat discouraged because the meeting made me realize just how easily a parent without our insider knowledge of the profession could have been intimidated by the roomful of teachers (seven in all) and by the casually thrown-around jargon, and how easily equivocal or evasive responses from the teachers could cause misleading ideas about their and their child’s rights. It was very discouraging.

On the other hand, I had several very pleasant experiences throughout the week. I met with a colleague in Lebanon to plan some professional development for her school, and she and I got to talking about our kids (our biological ones). Her daughter is a middle-schooler in my wife’s system, and she was telling me about how much her daughter loves her new English teacher, and then it turns out that the teacher is one of my former students and advisees. I even was one of her references for the job. It was very nice to hear that.

Another inspiring experience came from the course I’m teaching. I have an advisee working on a paper on Huck Finn for my American Lit class. She wants to write about the challenges of teaching the work, so I gave her the email of Craig Hotchkiss, the Education Program Director at the Mark Twain House and Museum. Craig was at the center of Manchester High School’s response to two parent challenges to Huck Finn back in 2007-08. Craig granted my advisee a lengthy interview that filled three single-spaced pages of notes on the events of the challenge and the district’s response. My student was delighted and even overwhelmed, in a good way, by Craig’s generosity.

And then today I learned that another current student, a very charming and articulate psychology major, grew up in my home town and is good friends with one of my youngest cousins (I am the fourth oldest of 20+ cousins, and at least a third of us went into education), and so he also knows my aunt and uncle really well. The uncle is a now-retired special education teacher from New Haven. Such a very unexpected coincidence.

I also learned that two close friends from the 1999 Summer Institute have returned to school for advanced degrees, which is really cool. They are two of the smartest, hardest working teachers I know, and that is saying a lot because I know so many smart, hard-working teachers. I hope they’re reading this and know I’m talking about them! Both will wind up in administration, which is a good thing. We need more talented administrators.

Perhaps my most enjoyable encounter, however, came on Tuesday night when I met with four of the five teachers who will be accompanying me to the National Writing Project Annual Meeting this November in Orlando. The three veteran teachers joining me are of course very excited to attend the meeting, but I am also taking two former undergraduate students, one who is a first year teacher in Colchester and one who is in her fifth year of the IB/M program and doing a graduate assistantship in the English department. The two young women are just beside themselves with excitement to attend their first big national conference. Their excitement is just infectious.

I guess this exchange was as inspirational as it was because the current climate of hostility toward teachers and our profession had been so discouraging. I need to see new teachers like these two still feel and express so much excitement and enthusiasm for the profession. It’s uplifting and encouraging to hear how popular and successful some of the new teachers are, like my former student who is teaching my friend’s daughter, or to see a pre-service teacher get jazzed up from talking with a retired teacher about teaching a controversial book. I need that sort of affirmation.

I also had paper conferences with half of the twenty students in my class this week. It was pretty hectic to meet with so many students in between meetings and teaching and other appointments, but it is very fun and cool to sit and talk with all these bright young students, to talk about books with them and help them plot out their papers. Mostly they are just smart and excited to learn, and like the two young women coming with us to Orlando, they are just infectious. It’s invigorating to meet and talk with them. Truly, it boggles my mind when I think about how much so many of my colleagues in the English Department really don’t enjoy advising or meeting with students. Some like it, but many—too many—do not. I don’t get it.

I have a friend I used to teach with at RHAM High who, whenever things began to look gloomy in the profession, used to say, “The best thing is when you close your door and it’s just you and your kids.” And that’s exactly it, isn’t it? Sometimes we have to just shut out everything else—hostile journalists, uninformed legislators, unrealistic parents, unsupportive administrators (or micromanaging administrators, or, well, you can choose your own adjective!), and even ineffective colleagues, and just teach our kids.

Budgets and Other Happy Subjects

2010-09-15T21:52:00.001-04:00

I felt really good on my drive to work this morning. My happiness began late last night when one of our TCs from Windham High texted me to tell me that the Windham school budget had finally passed by 130 votes on the fifth try. There will still be cuts from last year, but at least we have a budget and the battle is over for this year.

I slept well, and had gone to bed earlier than I usually do, so I actually got a good night’s sleep for once. My kids behaved well this morning—which is not always the case. Usually my four year old daughter is good for at least one round in timeout before breakfast, typically for scratching her brother for some unknown offense. But not this morning. I also had an eight AM conference with Cormac’s new teacher. He just began second grade, and had a couple of rough days. I was kind of dreading the conference, but it went really well.

(This is a tangent, but his teacher told me one ridiculously funny story. Apparently he refused to do some math work because he considers it boring—can’t imagine where he got that idea—and then when he got really insubordinate the teacher went to remove him from class and he told her that he was going to turn into a vampire and come to her house at night and suck her blood. I laughed out loud when she told me that, and she said that as mad as she was at him at the time, she had a hard time not bursting out laughing when he said that, too).

Then I drove my daughter to school in the beautiful morning sunlight, and listening to sports talk radio learned that the Yankees had won in extra innings and thereby had regained first place in the American League East. It was a good morning.

Later in the day I finished a draft of an article that will be appearing later this semester in UConn Magazine about education in general and Windham in particular. It is not an upbeat article, but I was glad to get it done by deadline, which was 5 o’clock, and I finished by 3:30. So I took a short walk around campus and got myself some coffee, and watched the undergraduates walking to class—all listening to music, texting, or talking on their phones. But there were lots of students on this glorious day sitting beneath trees, reading. Several classes were meeting outside. In fact, I let my class have response groups outside on Tuesday afternoon. It was wonderful moving from group to group, each one in a different but equally bucolic location. It felt like something out of Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

But seeing all the students outside today and having my class meet outside the day before made me a little nostalgic for being an undergrad. I remember how much I loved being an English major as an undergrad because I would do exactly what these students were doing throughout the fall and spring. I would grab whatever novel I happened to be reading at the time, and I would sit myself beneath some tree or atop some stone wall or on a bench somewhere, and I would just read for an hour or two or three till I had to go to class or eat. I took nothing more than a pen with me besides the book, so I could write notes in the margins. (I rarely kept a notebook of any kind).

I had a girlfriend for most of my senior year, and she used to experience such strong envy that it bordered on anger because she was a physical therapy major, and she couldn’t very well lug her copy of Grey’s Anatomy and all her reference books and notebooks to the base of some sugar maple and commune with earth and sky. She also used to get mad at me when we’d study together and I’d laugh out loud at something funny I’d read in a book. Her anatomy texts never made her laugh. But that’s another story.

However, I don’t get to do that much anymore. I spend an inordinate amount of time in meetings or in front of my two computer screens sending and answering emails, crunching budget numbers, and writing reports. And if you have ever been to the CWP office and have seen my private office space, you know I basically have a Bartleby set-up with a window that looks out on a courtyard that has one Japanese maple tree, one glass entryway, and three four-story high brick walls, and that serves as the departmental smoking lounge. Thank goodness for that Japanese maple and the oblique sky and sun I get from above my basement windows. So it was really nice to take the students outside Tuesday.

This past weekend I was mowing the lawn in back one afternoon. While my daughter napped, my son kept me company. As I marched back and forth across the lawn, he sat quietly atop a big rock on the end of a stone wall that separates our yard from a large field owned by my neighbor. The field still has old apple and pear trees in it, and attracts deer and hawks. In the summer evenings it’s fun to take the kids to watch lightning bugs light up the darkness. The kids love this field. And so while I mowed, Cormac sat for a solid hour and just drew picture after picture of the tree line, the field, the clouds. At other times he will sit back there and read to himself, or take a field guide and try to identify trees or bugs. I love that he does this, and hope he ends up with a college major—and later a job—that gives him the chance to always do this, or at least from time to time on sunny Tuesday afternoons in the fall.

Just Don't Get Me Started!

2010-09-08T22:25:00.001-04:00

Last week I strove to be positive, since it was the first post of the new year, but this week I have to vent a little. This Tuesday the education budget in Windham goes to referendum for the fifth time. Last night was a public forum on the budget, and by all accounts it was pretty vitriolic. Honestly, this is not the worst budget session I have experienced. When I was teaching at RHAM High School it took four referenda to get funding approved for new school construction, and then subsequently it took twelve referenda to approve an education budget. (I won’t get into the fact that at the same time on a separate vote football was approved to be added as a varsity sport on the first vote. We lost four teachers and suffered the departure of a fairly pro-teacher superintendent, but we got football as a solace for our losses. Don’t get me started!).

This budget vote has gotten me frustrated for myriad reasons. I am frustrated that the federal government can spend billions of dollars on war but so little on education. I am furious that the federal government spent billions of dollars to bail out financial institutions and auto makers but only recently approved a one time surplus for schools of ten billion dollars. It sounds like a significant amount of money, but consider that President Obama is currently seeking five times that amount for road construction. And furthermore, it is just a stop gap. The money will allow schools to save some jobs now, but what happens next year?

I am frustrated that the federal government is playing cat and mouse games with the Race to the Top funds, requiring states to erode tenure laws and place undue emphasis on standardized testing to qualify for the money, and then awarding money to so few states!

I am frustrated that the state contributes so little to local education. The high school reform act has been passed, with implementation deferred for several years, but there is no plan in place for how to fund implementation of the new law’s mandates when the time comes—and the federal stimulus money is gone.

I am frustrated that we continue to rely on property taxes for local education funding, which only creates an incredibly unequal system that results in incredible disparities in funding and thus quality of education. I hate that magnet schools and charter schools somewhat address this provincial approach to school funding but in ways that erode teachers’ professional rights, much as the demands of the Race to the Top grants do.

It drives me crazy to hear local politicians and newspaper editors and just local residents demean and blame the teachers and declare that they won’t vote yes for the school budget because the teachers have it too good and there are too many administrators. Do the folks who say this have any idea how much work it is to teach? Do the folks who say this really think their no vote is going to result in administrative positions being eliminated in the next budget round? Of course these are rhetorical questions. As a former colleague of mine used to say, the civilians would never understand.

When there are cuts we just lose teachers and wind up with larger class sizes. An acquaintance of mine said the other day that he liked when this sort of thing happened periodically because it forced the boards of education and finance to “trim the fat out of the budget.” I asked him if eliminating teachers, eliminating aides, increasing class sizes, and reducing or eliminating world language programs, art, and music was his idea of trimming out the fat. He admitted that he never really gave the details much thought.

I am insanely angry that the four referenda in Windham had voter turnouts of 13%, 12%, 11%, and 13% of eligible voters respectively. I don’t understand how so many people can just not bother, how so many people just don’t care. Apparently they don’t care if it passes or if it fails. They just don’t care. Period.

It drives me crazy to see so many talented pre-service or newly graduated teachers with such poor job prospects. These young men and women could be doing such wonderful work helping our students, and they are just idle—going back to school to ride out the recession, living home, leaving the profession, leaving the state, taking part time and non-traditional positions. And even the ones who still have jobs are taking second jobs. Before the educational enhancement acts of the 1980s, second jobs and part time jobs were, if not the norm, pretty common within the profession. Then they became rare because they became unnecessary. Now they are becoming quite common again. Several of my wife’s colleagues tend bar and wait tables on Friday and Saturday nights. Just the other day I was in the supermarket and one of the teachers from my son’s school made me a turkey grinder at the deli station when I stopped in on the way home after a late night at work. Just trying to pay the bills, she told me. She’s young, new to the profession, and very good, but the pay in Windham doesn’t cut it.

This is why I want to scream when I hear some guy in the checkout line going on and on about how well paid teachers are and how little work they have to do and how bad they are at their jobs despite all this. And so he’s voting against the budget—again.

We’re hosting a secondary writing centers conference here in Storrs again next month, and all the participating schools are asking us for a couple hundred dollars here or there to pay for bus transportation, to purchase a table, purchase some chairs, books, maybe a laptop—just one. Please. Their schools just don’t have the funds and they hope the university does.

Please, just don’t get me started.

First Day of School

2010-09-01T15:18:00.001-04:00

So many bad and frightening and infuriating things to write about today in the world of education, but I am going to try to stay upbeat and positive—at least for this first post.

This morning was my son’s first day of school in Windham, and it is his seventh birthday. He seems to be pretty OK with the fact that his birthday falls on or around the first day of school every year. He gets to be the first kid to bring cupcakes to school each year, and that must earn him some credibility among seven-year olds.

His mom had to be out of the house and at her school before he was up, but she left him a nice card. Our daughter is with my mother for the next few days because she doesn’t start preschool till the eighth. I think Cormac kind of liked not having her there this morning. It made for a quieter start to the day. I wrote him a poem for his birthday, as I do every year. He could read it himself but he asked me to read it to him, and he gave me a big hug afterward. Then we went for a walk up to the green by our house, though we couldn’t go for as long a morning walk as we used to because his school’s start time is thirty minutes earlier this year. Then we walked to school, which is only two doors down from our house. He handled the whole thing much better this year. Last year he cried. This year a little girl who had cried with him last year was crying again and being comforted by the same teacher, but Cormac walked right by her and took his seat without incident.

He wore a favorite bug T-shirt and his new sneakers, a baseball cap he knows he will be made to remove, and he smuggled in one lucky silly-band and a drawing pad and colored pencils. We got there and discovered that he had been switched to a different teacher, though we had received no notification from the school. I tried to be understanding since there had been some administrative turnover during the summer. His new teacher is the more experienced of the two, so perhaps the change will turn out to be fortunate. He had two best friends last year. One is in class with him and the other is in the other class. I took a bunch of photos with my phone, got permission to bring in cupcakes tomorrow, introduced myself to the new principal on my way out, and headed home to start my day.

UConn began classes this past Monday but I didn’t meet my new students till Tuesday afternoon. They seem like a good bunch—mostly non-English majors. I have a couple of my own advisees and a former high school student of my wife’s. I overenrolled a couple of students who pleaded desperation. We’re discouraged from overenrolling students in W sections, writing intensive courses, but I always let in a couple. I had a lot of requests for overenrollment this year, but I don’t think it had anything to do with me. It’s because my course is on Evil in American Literature. Seems like many students found that to be an exciting topic. I sort of knew that would be the case when I wrote the course description. The only thing that likely would have sparked more interest is Sex in American Literature. Maybe I’ll offer that next fall. I impressed them by getting all their names right after one round of introductions. It’s a silly dog and pony trick, but it always seems to make a good first impression.

I’m excited about the course. I’m teaching six novels, a play, and a book of poetry—Huck Finn, Sanctuary, A Streetcar Named Desire, Howl, Interview With The Vampire, The Handmaid’s Tale, Beloved, and No Country For Old Men. Four of the works (Sanctuary, Interview, Handmaid, and No Country) I have never taught before, so that will be an exciting challenge for me, though I have taught other works by Faulkner and McCarthy. I spent August re-reading those four novels to get ideas and to refresh my memory of the books. It was a good thing I did that, too, as I found several cool connections I wouldn’t have thought of or noticed otherwise. I forgot all the allusions Lestat makes to Shakespeare plays in Interview. And I found an allusion to the rape scene from Streetcar in The Handmaid’s Tale, and a reference to Mammon in No Country For Old Men that I can pair up with the references to Moloch in Howl, both being false gods mentioned in the Bible. I also took note of the respective whiteness of both Pap Finn and Popeye Vitelli from Sanctuary, and a reference to Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men as a ghost, which can complement the ghost Beloved. It’s good to re-read!

Fortuitously, one of the students took a class this summer with a colleague that focused on Satan in literature. They read things like the Book of Job, Paradise Lost, and Doctor Faustus. So I asked him to give a brief presentation during the second class in order to provide some helpful literary and historical context for the much more contemporary works we will be reading. He was excited by the request.

So while my son is getting ready to dive into second grade and my daughter is about to embark on her second year of preschool, I will be discussing evil and Satan with a bunch of undergraduates. Strikes me as a funny contrast, the relative innocence of elementary school and the lack thereof in college!

I hope everyone has gotten off to a good start and that all the recovered jobs that resulted from the stimulus funds remain in place beyond this year. Please look out for this column every week throughout the school year!

Steal This Book!

2010-05-05T22:00:00.003-04:00

Last week I collected term papers from my undergraduate students in the Advanced Composition course. One of the women in the course wrote about a time during high school when she fell in love with Gabriel García Márquez. It was the spring semester of her senior year. One day she went to the school library to see what they had by García Márquez, and she discovered a book that hadn’t been checked out in over a decade. On a whim, she stole the book. The weather was beautiful and she was suffering from a serious case of senioritis, so she skipped class and snuck out to the parking lot to stretch out on the hood of her car and read Love in the Time of Cholera.

I love that story. I told her that it made me want to be nineteen again so I could meet that girl. But the story also made me think that, despite the fact that there are several things she did that were ostensibly wrong—stealing a book and cutting class—my student demonstrated a love and appreciation for literature that would have made me proud. She probably had a deeper, more meaningful experience with that novel than if she had read it in class and completed weekly reading quizzes and a five paragraph expository essay with a thesis statement in the last line of the first paragraph. Etc. Etc.

This week is the last week of the academic semester at UConn, and so this blog entry is going to be my last till the fall. I was thinking about this as I was thinking about what I wanted to write this week. And my original idea was to write about the kind of learning, reading, and writing we do over the summer. I know so many of us long for the summers so we can actually do some serious pleasure reading. So we can read all the great new novels that came out this past year that we couldn’t find the time to read amid all the paper grading and progress reports and PPT meetings and such.

But that got me thinking about all sorts of unstructured and unsanctioned learning that takes place within and without school.

Though this admission may annoy some of you—it certainly annoyed a few of my colleagues when I was a high school teacher—I used to let students hang out in my class when they were supposed to be elsewhere. My last year at RHAM, I had one senior who used to cut class to come to my second and my fourth period classes in American Literature. She didn’t have me for American Lit when she was a junior because I was on sabbatical, so in a sense she repeated her junior year by coming to my class regularly. She especially liked when we read plays. She would take parts and did a great job reading her lines.

I had another student who was in my fourth period class who used to skip her seventh period class to come to my class a second time each day. It was the same prep but a nicer class—better behaved and more involved. In this girl’s case, she had some serious problems going on at home (a parent was in the process of getting arrested for embezzlement, of all things), and I guess my room was a safe place. The teacher whose class she was skipping was a good friend of mine, and I used to call him to let him know the girl was with me. We both preferred that she be with me than leave school grounds and go who-knows-where to deal with her problems. I don’t recall if the girl passed the class she cut so frequently, but because of the better rapport in my seventh period class, she learned more in there than she did in the fourth period class she was actually enrolled in.

So I don’t mean to encourage cutting classes as a means to educational attainment, but simply to make a point. In this era of high stakes standardized testing, merit pay for teachers tied to state tests, and even property values tied to CMT and CAPT scores, we should remember that not all learning happens in the formulaic, sanctioned ways we intend it to occur. Sometimes our best discussions of our subject matter take place in the hallways between classes and the best papers our students write are in personal journals they never share with anyone.

Today we had a department meeting and yet another debate about our merit pay policy. Let me tell you, listening to a bunch of English professors quibble about whether a certain committee should be worth one point or two or whether a poem is equivalent to a scholarly article was simply disheartening. I kept asking myself if anyone else in the room besides me remembers falling in love with words, remembers reading novels beneath trees in autumn, or writing love poems to people out hearts pined for desperately.

I spent ninety minutes in a windowless room on this glorious day thinking, I shouldn’t be here. I should steal a book and go read it on the hood of my car in the parking lot. Could you imagine if you had your class do that as a lesson? Could you imagine your building principal or superintendent doing that?

Anyway, I know this summer we’ll all be teaching summer school and writing curricula and doing book orders and preparing new preps and such, but I hope that most of you find the time to read a book or two beneath a tree, or to write a poem or letter to someone you love. Just take the time to remind yourself why you fell in love with this field in the first place. Otherwise, it’s just a job, and we might as well be stacking boxes in a warehouse, or denying insurance claims in a Dilbert cubicle in some basement office of an insurance giant.

Arts and Athletics

2010-04-28T22:47:00.001-04:00

I hated playing Little League Baseball as a kid. I sort of liked soccer, and wrestling was OK the year I did it, but by and large I was not into organized sports. I was not good at them, I got little playing time, and they were a source of conflict with my more athletic friends who liked to brag about their prowess and tease those of us who didn’t play well.

I was a good reader and writer. I won the award for Best Artist at my middle school graduation. I played guitar from the age of seven—first classical, then blues and rock, and later jazz. But I always tried to fit in as an athlete. I tried swimming, cross country, and track and field. I even did karate at the YMCA for one lesson. I did summer baseball camp for two years. But I was just not a good athlete. In high school I completely abandoned art and music, and joined the football team. Just about anyone could make the football team if you stuck it out, because they needed a large squad for practice. My team had fifty players on the varsity squad, and another thirty on the freshmen team. But I was terrible, and I never played, except in blowouts. I guess I was just trying to fit into jock culture.

When I went to college, I got involved in martial arts, and did enjoy them for several years as a club or extracurricular activity, but even that I was only moderately successful in. I don’t know why I never embraced the arts. I did, of course, go on to major in English. And I wrote for the school newspaper for three semesters, and even resumed jazz guitar lessons on and off throughout my undergraduate years. But I never pursued creative writing classes, and never resumed drawing, painting, or sculpting. The closest I came to the plastic arts was working as an model for the art department. They paid well and always needed males, and I had no modesty, so it was a good fit. But no actual art for me. I really didn’t even write creatively again till I participated in the Summer Institute in 1999.

If I wanted to oversimplify things, I could blame my father for pushing me into sports. He and his brothers were the consummate jocks, and my dad did put a lot of value on athletic prowess. But truth be told, my dad wasn’t that influential in my decisions, and in actuality he was a damn good artist, too. He had studied architecture and then later majored in biology and became a high school biology teacher. I used to love to look at his sketches in his architecture notebooks, as well as in his anatomy and physiology notebooks.

I guess I was just more interested in trying to fit in than in trying to pursue my interests and talents. I still regret not honing my skills in art. To this day I have a lot of raw talent, and I dream of having the time to take classes some day.

But what made me think about this was my son, who participated in his first poetry reading yesterday. He’s six, and one of his poems was selected for the Creative Writing Program’s Poetic Journeys program. It was called “Snow, Rain, Snow, Rain, Snow, Rain.” He wrote it last year in kindergarten. He read it aloud from a podium in the Benton Museum in front of a small crowd of adults and students. He’s a nervous kid, and I didn’t think he’d follow through and do it, but before the reading began he actually asked me if I had a copy of his poem on hand, and when I gave it to him he went and sat in a corner and read it to himself over and over again to practice. I was really proud of him.

He’s had a lot of success in the arts these last few years. There’s no art or music at his school. They were cut or drastically reduced. (I believe he gets thirty minutes of music once a month, no exaggeration, and no art whatsoever). So we have enrolled him in drawing classes, pottery classes, and guitar classes at the Community School of the Arts, which is at UConn’s Depot campus (you know, the creepy one with all the unoccupied old buildings). He’s loved the classes, and has really thrived. He took drawing last summer and enjoyed it immensely, but when we tried to enroll him in drawing classes for the school year, there were none that worked with our schedules, and so we put him in the pottery class, which he’s loved. He’s even won two awards, one in each semester’s art show.

We did try to get Cormac involved in sports. He took swimming lessons, and did all right. He has played sports at camp each of the last two summers, but spent most of his time in the art or nature rooms. He even won the Golden Cockroach award for correctly answering the most nature questions in his age group. We also signed him up for T-ball last year, and Amy coached. He didn’t hate it, but he spent most of his time looking for bugs in the outfield, and when asked this year if he wanted to do T-ball again, said no, and asked if we could put him in an art or science class.

The other day, Cormac was reading a biography of John James Audubon, and since then he’s been telling everyone that he thinks he wants to be a Naturalist when he grows up. That way he can study nature and also draw what he sees, like Audubon did in his notebooks.

I’m proud of my artsy kid, and I hope he never makes the mistake I made of making a false pursuit of sports at the expense of something he really loves and is good at.

Education and its Alternatives

2010-04-21T13:48:00.000-04:00

Now that they are finishing up the spring semester of their junior year, my students in the Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers class have begun to apply what they have learned in their education courses and clinical placements to their own classes. They have begun to meta-analyze the teaching practices of their own professors, and the first few minutes of every class end up being an interesting forum for their own discussion of the merits and often the demerits of many of their professors. Sometimes this devolves into a mere gripe session that I have to squash, but often it provides a fruitful analysis and discussion of the pedagogies of the men and women they are supposed to be learning from. Yesterday’s discussion was especially insightful.

For me, yesterday’s conversation came at an interesting time for a number of reasons. One reason is that we are at the end of the semester and so one of the things all of the professors have to do is submit merit reports. And although there have been many efforts lately to alter the merit review process to be more considerate of service and administration, it remains heavily biased toward scholarship and includes little consideration of teaching.

At the same time, just this past Monday the New York Times ran an article about efforts to create alternative teacher certification programs akin to Connecticut’s Alternate Route to Certification. After I posted that article on my wall in Facebook, I ended up in a lengthy discussion with my friend Jim who teaches at one of the SUNY campuses. Jim basically was arguing to get rid of education programs entirely, and I was countering by saying that most professors could benefit from some coursework in teaching methods.

So this was interesting to me as I listened to the young women in my class (I have only one male student, and he was absent that day) talking about their professors. They did praise a few of their professors. One was praised for being brilliant and for being able to facilitate lively discussions that involved the whole class. Another was praised for the quality of her writing instruction, particularly her ability to train the students how to run effective peer response groups. But then there were the complaints about one professor who flat out refused to read any rough drafts of the paper he assigned for the course because it was not a W class and so therefore he had no intentions of doing any writing instruction, even simple proofreading of a draft. Several professors were excoriated for being incapable of leading a discussion. Complaints ranged that they either just liked to hear themselves talk, or they cut off students, or belittled students, or did little more than ask a handful of questions that were answered by two or three of the same students every week, and somehow they thought this constituted discussion. Other students complained of professors whose writing assignments were so narrow and rigid that writing papers for them seemed like nothing more than a guessing game. Or the professor who bragged about giving only ten A’s in his lengthy career. (One student wondered aloud if this didn’t indicate a failure on the professor’s part, that in all his decades of teaching he never learned how to mentor students into doing their best work). And there were many complaints about papers with letter grades and no comments, or papers not returned for weeks, or not returned at all.

Most of this discussion involved English professors, but Education professors did not get universal praise, either. Many students expressed incredulity at the professors whose teaching violates every pedagogical principle they promote. Many were shocked by how many Education professors have spent little or no time in K-12 classrooms as teachers.

I encouraged the students to emulate the many examples of good teaching they mentioned, and to learn by inverse example from the others. I also pointed out a couple of things. One, for many of the professors who lecture rather than lead discussions or who assign papers but don’t teach writing, these were the dominant modes of instruction for decades, including the instruction they received. And two, as a result of that, it has only been recently (and certainly not universal) that graduate students in English have begun to receive extensive training in teaching, especially the teaching of writing. And it is likewise a recent phenomenon (and also not a universal one) to require students studying to be high school English teachers to have extensive content coursework. I recall when students at UConn studying to be high school English teachers only had to take one English course a semester their junior and senior years. Now, students have to take at least eight English courses, which is only two fewer than the straight English majors. And the students who pursue the dual degree in English and Secondary Education have to take thirteen English courses—three more courses than the regular English majors!

To me, these are good signs, at least at UConn. In truth, good teachers do come out of alternate certification programs, and lousy teachers still come out of rigorous traditional education programs. (And some coursework in education does seem pretty superfluous—or at least it did to me twenty years ago!). And many professors figure out how to be damn good teachers without ever having received any formal training in how to teach. But these tend to be the exceptions. At least we know that UConn is producing secondary teachers who are entering the field with significantly more content knowledge than we used to have. And graduate students, at least those here in the English Department, are entering the field of higher education with significantly more pedagogical training than graduate students from earlier generations. So hopefully my friend Jim’s criticism of high school English teachers will come to have less and less merit, and my undergraduate students’ criticism of their professors will likewise become less relevant and normative.

Poetry of the Socially Networked

2010-04-15T21:46:00.001-04:00

Two years ago we held the New England Writing Projects Annual Retreat at Whispering Pines in Rhode Island. It’s a beautiful facility. Old cabins along a lake beneath tall pines. We spent the days in professional development workshops, learning from one another. But come eight o’clock when the last workshop ended, it was truly Whispering Pines. There was no town. There was no pub. There was no television. I think they even gated the compound. It was a little too secluded for me. Most (OK, all) of my colleagues turned in early. I did, too, and in truth got up early and went for a nice run.

Last year we held the retreat at the Hotel Northampton in Northampton, Massachusetts. It’s a great hotel, and I love the town. There are art galleries, coffee houses, bars and restaurants, book stores, a hot tub place. It’s just a cool town. So we had our workshops and our dinner, and then night time arrived and … nothing. I tried to drum up interest among the teachers in a night on the town, checking out the galleries, finding some live music, doing a little bar hopping. But no. I got a few folks to sit with me in the lobby and have a drink before bed. I thought, OK, this is not Whispering Pines, and I am not turning in early and going for a run in the morning. So I went out alone, checked out the art gallery, got a cup of coffee, people watched, found a nice bar to have a drink, got to bed around midnight and slept in a little.

So this year when we hosted the retreat at UConn, I was determined to arrange something social for the evening, if for no other reason than to have something to do myself. Now Storrs is not Whispering Pines but it is also not Northampton. For night life there’s Starbucks and then there’s Starbucks. Therefore, I approached the Graduate Assistant Director of the Creative Writing Program, Sean Forbes, who will be the CWP’s Graduate Assistant Director next year, and asked him to arrange an Open Mic event for Friday night.

Sean did a great job, as did Denise Abercrombie from E.O. Smith. We held the event in the Stern Lounge of the CLAS Building, just upstairs from our office. The room was filled almost to capacity, with people sitting in the doorways to find room to stretch their legs. The readings began at 8:30 and went almost to 11 PM. The evening began with about a half dozen of Denise’s high school students from her creative writing classes, and also included both her teenaged son and her nine year old son, who read a very playful poem and showed no reservations at the mic. Denise also read, as did her husband Jon, who teaches at Quinnebaug Valley Community College. From there Sean took over and introduced another seven or eight undergraduate students from his creative writing classes and from the undergraduate staff of the Long River Review. Two girls from the drama department even read a one-act play written by another student playwright.

From there we opened up the night to the teachers from the various New England writing project sites, and perhaps a dozen came to the mic to read their work. In all we had perhaps thirty readers—a third grader, more than a dozen high school students and undergraduate students, a couple of graduate students, another dozen or more K-12 teachers, and a couple of college or university faculty members. And the poetry (and some prose) was terrific. One undergraduate student even wrote an impromptu paean to Denise and Jon’s nine year old son and read it as our closing piece for the night.

On Friday prior to the open mic, Jane Cook and I presented a workshop on our efforts to build a web presence for the CWP, and to increase our efforts at offering professional development in technology. But the highlight of the workshops was Saturday’s presentation by the NWP’s Paul Oh on Pedagogy of the Socially Networked. Paul actually co-presented with Andrea Zellner of the Red Cedar Writing Project in Michigan, but Andrea remained in Michigan. We video-conferenced with Andrea via skype, a laptop, an lcd projector, and a microphone. Paul put Andrea’s image on the right hand side of the screen, and on the left hand side he projected the google document he and Andrea created, so that all of us could see the document that Andrea and Paul were referencing live, and for those of us with laptops, since the Nathan Hale Inn has wireless internet access, we, too, could type in the URL and link up to the googledoc, launching its embedded links and files and even participating in a sidebar chat with other TCs from across the conference room. It was pretty cool, and I think much of it was new to many of the participating teachers. People left a little blown away but filled with ideas, particularly from the planning and sharing sessions that followed each workshop presentation.

But as always, there is no rest for the weary. The following Monday through Wednesday, Kelly Andrews-Babcock and I resumed and completed interviews of candidates for the Summer Institute. Today I sent out acceptance emails to sixteen teachers to become our newest cohort of Teacher Consultants. This will be our twenty-eighth Summer Institute since 1982, and these sixteen teachers will bring our total to 438. It’s exciting to think that in two years we will celebrate our thirtieth anniversary, and soon thereafter see our numbers reach 500.

One last piece of good news. This past Tuesday was the deadline for the Senate Dear Colleague letter to support continued direct funding for the NWP. At four o’clock I got word from Lieberman’s education aide that he had signed the letter, and at six o’clock I heard from Dodd’s aide that he, too, had signed. Things are looking good for that thirtieth reunion.

Travel and Transformation

2010-04-08T22:43:00.002-04:00

Lately, one of the toughest things about writing this column has been deciding what to write about. There is plenty of education news to discuss, but it’s mostly depressing—budget cuts and job shortages. I feel awful for the students going onto the market now. There are so many talented students in both English and Education that are entering a bleak job market and are essentially competing amongst themselves for a handful of positions. So anyway, I didn’t want to write about that because it’s nothing everyone doesn’t already know and isn’t already upset about.

So then I thought I should write about the New England Writing Projects Annual Retreat we’re hosting at UConn this weekend, but I really should write about that next week after it has happened and I have something to report on. Right now the only thing I could really write about is how frustrated I am by people who cancel at the last moment.

OK, so I will stop writing about that because I don’t want to get worked up. Especially since I’m really looking forward to the retreat and to the open mic event we organized with the Creative Writing program for Friday night.

But organizing a conference has certainly made the week a little crazy. And if that weren’t enough, my wife and six year old son leave tomorrow morning for Spain. My wife Amy is the head of a high school world language department, and she typically takes students abroad every other year. She has taken students to Spain (several times), Costa Rica (twice), Ecuador and the Galapagos, and Argentina and Uruguay. This year there was a trip to Costa Rica in November that had been planned well in advance. Then one day last spring a high school teacher named Cesar from Cordoba, Spain contacted Amy about doing a one-and-one home exchange between their schools. Students from the school in Cordoba would come to my wife’s school in the fall and then students from my wife’s school would go to Cordoba in the spring. The plan was for this to take place in 2010-11. Amy was eager to agree. Later that spring she got a call from Cesar, who said there was good news and bad news. The good news was that his school had gotten the grant they had applied for to get funding for the trip. The bad news was that the grant was for 2009-10, meaning Amy had to prepare to host students from Spain that coming fall. The insanity that ensued from that phone call is for another day. But now it is time for Amy’s students to head to Spain for the second half of the exchange. Tomorrow morning Amy, another teacher, eighteen high school students, my son, and the other teacher’s twelve year old daughter leave for Cordoba, where they will be till April 24.

Cormac is six and by the time he returns he will have been to thirteen US states, Quebec, London, Paris, Florence, Pisa, Madrid, and Cordoba. I didn’t go abroad to Spain until I was fifteen, and then not again till my girlfriend and I backpacked around Western Europe the summer after her senior year and my completion of the Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates. Amy and I are so happy to be able to offer our kids the opportunity to travel, even if it means being ancillary to a group of high school students.

My trip abroad during my sophomore year of high school was simply transformative, and I only spent three weeks in Spain. For most of that time I lived with a family who had two kids my age—Susana, who was a year older than me, and Raul, who was a year younger than me—and a younger son. They lived in a contemporary flat in the new part of Valladolid, which had been the capital during the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus met the king and queen in Valladolid, and he died there not long after his voyage. We took a day trip to see the castle of Ferdinand and Isabella, which at the time was under no special protection, and I remember high school boys riding motor cross bikes up and down what had once been the moat.

I went to classes most days but took frequent day- and weekend trips. My favorite trips were to Salamanca and Segovia, and also an overnight trip to Toledo. Our trip to Segovia was memorable, in part, because we took a bus to the outskirts of town to visit a famous garden, where I got ‘lost’ with two Spanish girls I had met, and the bus returned to town without us. We had to hitchhike back. Oddly enough, when the Spanish students had come to my high school the previous fall and we took them on a day trip to New York, I got separated from the group with one of my classmates and one of the Spanish girls, and since I had spent the summers of my childhood in New York, I just gave the two of them a walking tour and made sure we got back to Penn Station by five in the evening to meet everyone for the train ride home.

So while I don’t hope that any of the students on this trip with my wife pull any of the stunts I pulled as a fifteen year old, I do hope that they—and my son—see amazing places and meet amazing people, and come back feeling transformed in some small way.

Dogwood Blossoms and Direct Funding

2010-03-31T22:25:00.002-04:00

In “The Waste Land,” T. S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month; having been an expatriate and born in Missouri, Eliot could not have known that he was off by a month. At least by New England standards. Those of you who spent yesterday evening bailing out your basements know what I mean. I feel as if I have been wet for days. Thank goodness the weather is supposed to clear up. The only nice days I have experienced recently were the first two days of my trip to Washington, DC for the National Writing Project’s Spring Meeting. When I first arrived it was warm and sunny when I got off the train, and it was a delight to walk the three blocks to the hotel.

The cherry trees were not in bloom yet but the dogwoods were. I think the dogwoods and other flowering trees in DC get overshadowed by the cherry trees. All their white blossoms were just spectacular. They literally weighed down the branches of the trees and made them droop toward the sidewalks. I frequently had to duck beneath them as I passed below. The walk from the hotel on Capitol Hill to the legislative office buildings passes through a beautiful park filled with flowering trees and historical plaques marking the locations of various buildings and homes where famous men and women once lived and worked. The sunny spring days we enjoyed on Wednesday and Thursday made it hard to keep walking to the other side of Capitol Hill where we had work to do lobbying for the reauthorization of funding for the National Writing Project.

This year had threatened to be especially difficult, as President Obama’s and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s budget proposals for education involved, among other things, consolidating many directly funded programs such as the National Writing Project, Reading is Fundamental, and Teach for America, just to name a few. The idea is to provide block grants to states that various discrete educational institutions could then apply for. This concept is not new and has been proposed before, more typically under Republican administrations, and the idea is to treat education more like business; to make educators compete and thus design innovative proposals to earn funding for their projects. Of course in the case of the National Writing Project and other directly funded federal programs, this would mean even in the best case scenario that the national infrastructure which supports all 210 Writing Project sites would be eliminated, as would many small, poorly funded sites.

Anyway, without going into too much boring detail, it does not look like the National Writing Project is going to lose its direct federal funding. In general, the legislators we talked with said that in principle they like the idea of providing block grants to states to promote innovative education proposals, but not at the expense of programs with documented track records of success. And no legislators want to see universities in their districts or states lose federal funds. And Representative George Miller of California is a big supporter of the National Writing Project and he’s the chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor. So, in short, it looks like we’ll be all right. Though I am crossing my fingers and toes.

Lobbying legislators sounds like it might be a dull process, but I actually find the experience interesting and kind of fun, at least sometimes. Perhaps the most surprising thing to teachers when they first experience lobbying at the Spring Meeting is that so much of the actual work of running the government is done by underpaid aides and college interns. I’m perfectly serious. It’s rare that anyone gets to meet with an actual congressperson or senator. I had appointments with Senators Dodd and Lieberman, as well as Representatives DeLauro and Courtney. Other TCs from Storrs as well as Central and Fairfield had appointments with the other three representatives from Connecticut. Only Himes and Courtney actually met face to face with any of us. And both of them are junior legislators. In every other case we were met by aides. Senator Lieberman’s education aide was the most interesting one we met. He’s a twenty-year teaching veteran from Kansas who is on sabbatical from his high school to do an internship in Washington as a legislative aide. He was great to talk to because, of course, he knew what we were talking about.

But the long and short of what typically occurs is that there are far too many pieces of legislation for the senators and congresspeople to keep track of, and so the aides basically tell them what to support. We asked Lieberman’s aide to have the Senator sign the Dear Colleague letter, and so if he thinks support for direct funding for the National Writing Project is something consistent with the Senator’s positions on education, he makes sure to stick a copy of the Dear Colleague letter under Senator Lieberman’s nose and get him to sign it. When we ask Representatives DeLauro’s and Courtney’s aides to submit letters of support, those aides (or more likely someone working beneath them) type up a letter and give it to the aide who then gets it under the Representative’s nose for a signature. On the one hand, this might seem discouraging, as the elected officials themselves appear to be doing so little of the work of government. But on the other hand, it is rather encouraging to know that regular people are doing the work of running the government. And I do mean regular people. The aides are rather modestly paid with small, crowded office spaces. They are often young, and many have second jobs. Two of the four I met with moonlight as adjunct professors at local schools, one at a DC area community college.

On the last day in DC the bad weather returned. It was cold and threatening rain the whole morning, but the dogwood blossoms still looked beautiful against the grey sky.

Lassoing the Rain

2010-03-23T15:21:00.004-04:00

I generally hate political labels like liberal or conservative. I think they tend to categorize and limit rather than define and clarify, and they are often misnomers. How otherwise do you explain calling an environmental conservationist a liberal? Doesn’t wanting to conserve nature make one a conservative?

That said, I acknowledge that for me becoming more conservative with age has meant changing my voter registration from Green to Democrat, and if I were a politician and one were to look at my voting record I would probably look more liberal than Ted Kennedy.

On yet the other hand, I enjoy reading both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ political columns. My two favorite columnists are Molly Ivins and George Will, a most unlikely pair of bedfellows. I miss Molly Ivins, who died in 2007. She knew how to make smart writing funny, which isn’t easy. What I like about George Will is that, even though he’s rarely funny, he writes well and is reasonable. I rarely agree with him, but he always strikes me as someone I could civilly disagree with, someone who, unlike say Charles Krauthammer or—God forbid—Rush Limbaugh, would not jump to the mistaken conclusion that name-calling, dishonesty, and volume are valid rhetorical devices.

On Friday the Willimantic Chronicle, that bastion of journalistic excellence (OK, that’s name calling, which is why I’m not syndicated), jumped on the current anti-teacher bandwagon and ran an editorial that attacked teachers and teachers unions, arguing, among other things, that teachers in Windham whose students did not show adequate yearly progress under the definitions of No Child Left Behind “should eventually be terminated,” and concluded by advocating that school systems be allowed to bring suit against teachers unions “on behalf of any students who fail to meet the minimum test levels, seeking damages for the lives ruined by incompetence.” Notice that the emphasis is on “minimum test levels” and not on learning, progress, or education. Test levels.

In today’s Hartford Courant (and in every other Connecticut paper, I assume) the headline on the front page proclaimed that the Connecticut Supreme Court has declared that the Connecticut Constitution guarantees “not just a public education, but one that can prepare [students] for employment, higher education and civic responsibilities like voting and jury duty.” To which every public school teacher should probably say, No shit. But this is being hailed as a groundbreaking decision. And I understand that this decision will drive reform-minded educational legislation, but in truth the Supreme Court isn’t deciding anything that public school teachers haven’t been striving for day in and day out since forever. We don’t need a condemnatory editorial in a second rate newspaper or a self-evident conclusion from a court of law. We need a lot of funding and even more social justice. Which brings me back to George Will, believe it or not.

In his most recent column, Will criticizes Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (and liberalism in general) for a myopic vision of education. Now I agree with Will on his criticism of Duncan but not of liberalism on this one, and in part because Will places his critique in the context of the Civil Rights movement. What Will writes is that Duncan and Obama’s education policies ignore two essential facts: that the greatest predictors for educational success are family and income. He writes that “the best predictor of a school’s performance is family performance.” Kids from reasonably well-off, well-educated, two-parent families, kids whose parents are involved in their children’s education and go over their homework with them and meet the teachers and so forth succeed far better than those kids whose parents are poor, under- or unemployed, under-educated, and working too much and/or lacking the education to be involved or to help with homework. Likewise, Will writes that “the best predictor” of individual student performance is “family income.” High SAT scores, AP course enrollment, graduation rates, and college acceptance and enrollment rates all rise as family income levels rise. Teachers have always known this.

But this is where I disagree with Will, because if these aren’t civil rights or social justice issues, I don’t know what a civil right is. I don’t know if Will intends to attack families or social classes. I doubt he does. More likely he means to attack liberal economic and social programs like welfare as being causal factors in the failure of urban or impoverished family structures. Now I know there is dead wood in the teaching profession, as there is in every profession, and I know there are great teachers who defy the odds, but I wish someone would please tell me how teachers are supposed to effect large-scale changes in student success rates when the social and economic realities of so many of their students are dismal and dismally beyond their control.

Teachers are just an easy target in this debate. We generally enjoy stable and good if not great salaries, and our unions and our tenure give us enviable job security that few outside of the profession perceive as a function of academic freedom. For these we are envied, and in a poor economy envied all the more. At the same time, broad, ill-defined, faceless factors like racism, classism, generational poverty and the like seem impossible to attack because they are amorphous, overwhelming, mercurial, and daunting. When the ancients couldn’t make the rains come they slaughtered a goat because it was easier to lasso the goat than lasso the rain. The same principle seems at play here, just a different problem and a different target.

My last question for all the pundits who think firing teachers will solve the problem: since just about every certifiable content area is in critical shortage, once you fire all these teachers, where do you think you’re going to get anyone to replace them, never mind anyone of any quality whatsoever? And if you think anyone with content knowledge can do the job and we’ll be easy to replace, you really have another think coming.

What Makes a Good Teacher Good, Part II

2010-03-18T22:23:00.003-04:00

I had two requests to write a follow up to the column on what makes a good teacher good. So I’m going to give it a try.

One thing I did last week was go into Bulkeley High School and teach a demonstration class in one of my advisee’s classes. His name’s Mike. He’s student teaching there. The situation was not ideal. Besides the fact that Bulkeley is more than a little run down and the classrooms were cluttered and overcrowded, this was during CAPT administration. So these were seniors who had been detained in the auditorium for the duration of the science test. Then they were released for a seventy-five minute period prior to lunch. Furthermore, two classes were combined. Therefore, I had more than thirty seniors crammed into one basement room, who had just endured being essentially locked up for more than two hours, and who hadn’t eaten yet. Oh, and even though this was a British Literature class, they were reading The Catcher in the Rye because there were not enough copies of anything on the Brit Lit curriculum for all the students. My advisee, an education student from University of Hartford, and three members of the English department came to observe.

Mike suggested that the students might like to ask questions about college in general and UConn in particular, so after introducing myself I opened it up to Q&A. I was met with deafening silence. I waited. Thirty seconds into the silence a boy laughed, so I said, “Great, you get to ask the first question!” He responded with shock, so I said, “Don’t you know that rule? First student to laugh has to ask the first question? C’mon, you mean you’re a senior in high school and you never heard that rule? Everybody knows that rule. And then after I answer your question you get to pick the next student to ask a question.” Well, that’s all I needed. I asked the boy his name. It was Joshua. Joshua asked a question. Conversation began. He got to pick another student. Soon discussion was pretty fluid and I didn’t have to use that ploy anymore. The students asked many personal questions, like how did I get into teaching, and did I like students, and what did I like to teach, and what was the difference between high school and college students. I asked them similar questions. I spent no more than fifteen of the seventy-five minutes, but in that time we built some nice rapport that was easy to build upon once we began talking about the novel.

When I began thinking again about the question of what makes a good teacher good, I kept thinking about this day with the students at Bulkeley, and how easy it was to walk into an unfamiliar classroom with students I don’t know in a less than optimal situation and still manage to facilitate a really successful discussion. There was a content component, since I did know the material really well. And there was a pedagogical component, since I designed an effective series of writing activities and I know how to ask good questions and get students to respond to one another and not just use me as an intermediary through which all responses must pass. But I think the big thing was taking a few minutes to get to know the students and let them get to know me. They were willing to listen, participate, and behave because I had taken the time to humanize them and myself. I thought that perhaps this is the most important thing in making a teacher good.

I was part of two conversations yesterday and today that reiterated this to me. First, yesterday, I had another advisee who is currently student teaching come and speak to my juniors in the Advanced Composition course. Ostensibly he was there for them to ask questions about his approach to composing the big term paper for my course, but the students also wanted to ask him a million questions about student teaching. And when they asked Shaun if he witnessed good teachers and good teaching, he responded that there were plenty of really good teachers who connected with their students, but that there were also plenty who were just mailing it in, who sat aloof behind their desks and handed out worksheets, and who hit the parking lot before the busses had even left.

Then I had a conversation today with an advisee about Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, and I found myself telling her about my colleague Dennis. After a few years of teaching that book, Dennis began asking the students to write their own memoirs in imitation of Cisneros’ style. This was a pretty popular and successful assignment. But then one year Dennis’ mother died a few weeks before he began teaching Mango Street, and when it came time to ask the students to write their memoirs, Dennis began writing down his own memories of his mother. And he shared it with his students. In a word, they were captivated. It would be hard if not impossible to quantifiably demonstrate that the students that year became better writers than the students from previous years, but clearly they were more engaged than ever before.

Yes, Dennis was doing some really sound pedagogical things, such as using Cisneros’ book as a mentor text and modeling the writing processes of a capable, adult writer—himself. But I am inclined to say that the most important thing was that Dennis and his students shared their stories with one another. The rapport that emerged from this enabled Dennis to push, require, and demand more from those students than if he had been to them nothing more than a remote authority figure. Had he remained so, he would likely have encountered the same stoniness I did before Joshua’s laughter broke the silence and reminded us all that there were thirty-some-odd people sitting together in that overcrowded basement room.

What Makes A Good Teacher Good?

2010-03-03T23:11:00.002-05:00

When I finished my MA, I really wanted to remain in California. I wanted to move to San Francisco, but I had no job and no savings, and housing in the Bay Area was exorbitant. In short, I wound up applying for jobs back in Connecticut. But since this was before wide-spread use of the internet, I had to write the State Department of Education for a listing of all school districts and addresses, and I proceeded to mail a version of a single letter to all one hundred and sixty nine districts in the state of Connecticut expressing an interest in a job teaching high school English. I used my grandparents’ Madison address as a return address. Then I drove cross country in my old Hyundai Excel, got an apartment in the west end of Hartford, and a job waiting tables at a country club in Simsbury. Worst job I ever had, but that is clearly another story. And I waited for calls for interviews. Over the next several weeks, I got seven interviews, and ultimately I was offered six jobs.

The job I wasn’t offered sticks out in my memory for two reasons. I won’t name the school, but suffice to say it was on the Gold Coast. Besides using my grandparents’ Madison address as my return address, I also gave my then girlfriend’s Simsbury address as an alternate contact. I did this because I mailed out the letters before I had my place in Hartford. One reason I remember this interview so well is that when the secretary called to arrange the interview, she said to me something to the effect that “We see you list Madison and Simsbury as your residences. We think this is important because it is essential that teachers understand our kind of kids.” That alone should have made me decline the interview, but I needed a job, so I just said, “Yes, of course,” and was thankful that I hadn’t used my Hartford address or my parents’ addresses in Hamden.

The other reason I remember this interview was because my answer to one question doomed my chances. The head of the English department asked me what made me a good teacher, and I answered that teaching seemed to come naturally to me, and perhaps this was because I had grown up in a family of teachers, and so the profession in general was simply salient to me. Teaching was just intuitive. Well, the department head made no attempt to conceal his eye roll in response to my answer, and I knew I better head back to my hole in the wall in Hartford and my table-waiting job in Simsbury, and remember not to give that answer at the next interview.

I have thought about my answer to that questions many times over the years, and was reminded of it today when I read Elizabeth Green’s article in the New York Times, titled “Building a Better Teacher.” The article is a lengthy report on Ms. Green’s observations of two educational researchers’ work on what makes good teachers good. One of the things Green attempts to dispel is the notion that good teachers are born, that the skills requisite for good teaching are ever inherent or intuitive in some people, as I seemed to feel they were back when I was twenty-four.

Honestly, I must admit that I am ambivalent on the issue. But I am not as arrogant as I was at twenty-four. (My wife, mother, and good friends might challenge me on this, but I insist …). And so today I much more readily acknowledge the excellent training I received at UConn from Mary Mackley, Cheryl Spaulding, and Judy Irwin, in particular, as well as from my cooperating teacher Roz Rosen, and the faculty members in the English Department at Humboldt State University—notably Karen Carlton, Kathleen Doty, Tom Gage, and William Bivens. In retrospect, I was smart and confident and creative, and comfortable in front of a room of strangers; teaching was salient because I had grown up in a family of teachers; but I also received a great deal of truly excellent training from my professors and cooperating teachers.

So one of the things Green explores in her article is whether or not we can identify and thus recruit or teach those essential traits of the best teachers. Her conclusion, in a nutshell, is that yes we can. But as in all things of any complex nature, the devil is in the details.

I won’t summarize all of Green’s conclusions here. Her article is excellent and interesting, and you all can read it for yourselves. But what I found myself doing after reading the article was thinking about the best teachers I had—not the professors I listed above, but the elementary, middle, and high school teachers that really succeeded with me. Not simply the ones I liked, who may in fact have been mediocre teachers but nice people, but the truly talented teachers. Mrs. Plummer in first grade. Mr. Brucker in second grade. Mrs. McGough in sixth grade. Mr. Suprenaut in eighth grade. Mr. Miata and Mrs. Moakley in ninth grade. Mrs. Bonn in tenth grade and Mrs. Leary in eleventh. Language Arts, English, and History teachers all, except for Bonn (Spanish) and Leary (Math). I had lots of other good teachers, but this would probably be the short list for great teachers, K-12.

So, why so few, and what made them different? It’s so hard to say. All were kind and liked their students. I can’t recall any of them ever raising their voice (which is more than I can say for myself, that’s for sure). They knew their material. They were organized. They were demanding without being unreasonable or cruel. They all did not teach the same way, however. What, if anything, could I extrapolate and universalize from my experiences with them? What could I ever reproduce in a teacher training program? Truly, I’m not sure. Are you?

Welcome to the Twenty-First Century

2010-02-25T15:18:00.001-05:00

My first experience with a computer took place in 1977, when I was in the second grade. I was placed in a gifted and talented program that had Saturday classes at a local high school. A bunch of elementary school kids were piled into a computer lab where we learned how to program in BASIC. At the end of each class we were allowed to play rudimentary video games like Pong. Do you remember Pong? Just a blip on the screen moving back and forth and you and a partner each had control of a longer, more stationary blip that you could move to prevent the floating blip from getting past you for a score, sort of like air hockey on a video screen. Other than Atari video games and arcade games, I don’t think I touched a computer after that till my freshman year of high school.

Mine was the first entering class to be required to take a computer course. This was 1983. The class met in a small lab. It was a one quarter course, and afterwards I never saw the inside of that lab again. Senior year we were required to take typing with Brother Benjamin. Brother Benjamin sat at a desk on a raised platform from which he could observe us. He was ancient then but was still teaching seventeen years later when my brother graduated from the same school. We typed lessons from a book. Brother timed us using the wall clock, and signaled when to start and stop by bringing his hand down upon one of those bells you see on hotel lobby desks. When Brother rang the bell to stop, we had to count our own words and errors and calculate our own scores. We were left to our own recognizance. God was watching, of course. Literally. There was a huge crucifix above the chalkboards in each room.

One classmate of mine, Bryan DiBuccio, always got in trouble with Brother Benjamin. Bryan always tried to type a few extra words after Brother had rung the bell, but as old as Brother was Bryan never succeeded at deceiving him. But still he tried. Eventually it became a game between the two. Brother Benjamin would glower at Bryan from behind his raised desk and say, “Brother knows, Mr. DiBuccio. Brother knows everything!” The only time I ever saw Brother Benjamin get out of his seat during class was to strike Bryan. As usual, after Brother rang the bell, Bryan kept typing. Brother yelled, “Mr. DiBuccio! Stop!” But this time Bryan kept typing. Brother yelled again, louder, but Bryan kept typing and said something foolish like, “You can’t make me stop, Brother.” Well, Brother Benjamin may have been ancient, but he had also been a Gold Gloves boxer in the Navy before entering the Brothers of Holy Cross, and he was not to be messed with. With quickness that defied his age, Brother leapt from his seat and smacked both of Bryan’s cheeks with open palms. We all gasped. Bryan started to laugh and then said something like, “Brother, I didn’t know you still had it in you!” To which Brother Benjamin replied, “Don’t mess with Brother, Mr. DiBuccio. Don’t ever mess with Brother,” and resumed his elevated seat. Our ethics teacher told us that once Brother Benjamin had actually thrown the bell at his head when he was a student, but he had ducked, and the bell went right through the window. Brother forbade anyone to say anything about the incident, and had his dear friend Brother Theodore, the Latin teacher, repair the window over the weekend.

When I went to college I brought a Smith Corona electric typewriter that actually attached to a monitor where I could see what I had written and do my own proofreading on the screen before printing. When I was ready to print, I had to manually feed one page at a time through the carriage of the typewriter. When I began writing for the Daily Campus, they had just purchased Macintosh computers. Mac Plusses: no hard drive for storage, just a slot for a 3.5 inch floppy. These were hooked up to a networked printer, a big LaserWriter IISC. We had no software for layout, however, and so we had to make our columns on the screen and print them out. We’d walk the hard copies downstairs where the editors would cut the columns with exacto knives, run the paper through a waxing machine, and then manually paste them onto full-sized pages taped to the boards. These photoready pages would go out to the Willimantic Chronicle at some ungodly hour to be made into the newspaper.

These days I exist as a full-fledged member of the twenty-first century. I have a two screen monitor for my computer. I run a paperless classroom. The old Blue Whale for the Summer Institute is now on a flash drive. We call it the Blue Minnow. I blog. I can even do a little web design, though I mostly leave that to others. But I couldn’t help but shake my head last week when I read two articles in the New York Times. One reports that Macmillan Publishers is now selling what it calls DynamicBooks, which are basically wiki-texts. A professor or school district can purchase a text that can then be altered using wiki technology to suit the needs of their course and students. There’s been controversy regarding the implications for copyright law, as well as regarding possible scenarios like a district or instructor who might alter a section on evolution to support creationism.

The other item that grabbed me was Tufts University’s decision to accept one-minute long YouTube videos from students applying to Tufts. The videos have become so popular that the admissions office even plans to run a “Tufts Idol” contest that will allow undergraduates to vote on the best applications videos. Brother Benjamin would roll over in his grave if he knew, but I think he’s still teaching.

The Bad News First

2010-02-17T16:03:00.002-05:00

Spring Meeting

The administrative end of things is not my favorite part of being CWP director. I would much rather be teaching or writing. But someone has to do the administrative work.

Likewise, when I write this column I enjoy writing about teaching and about students and teachers. I don’t usually enjoy writing about things like policy. However, I have to mention this week that President Obama has made proposals that would radically alter the way NWP sites are funded, and should his proposal go through, the national infrastructure for the NWP would lose funding, and all 210 individual sites would have to complete with other educational entities for federal block grant funds.

Sites could wind up competing against each other and/or against other educational entities, like their own departments of higher education or host universities. For instance, because our site is housed in the English Department of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, we could hypothetically find ourselves competing against the Neag School of Education for funds.

In truth, I think our site would do all right; the English Department, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the university in general would be supportive of co-sponsoring grant proposals. Ironically, in fact, we could win a grant that gives us greater funding than we currently receive. However, but we’d still lose the support of the NWP, and we’d see many of the smaller, less well-supported sites around the country disappear.

So this makes this year’s Spring Meeting in DC especially important. We not only need to persuade our senators and representatives to re-authorize the funding for the NWP, we need to persuade them to re-write the legislation so that direct funding is restored. Emails to senators and representatives would help the cause.

New England Writing Projects Annual Meeting

On a brighter note, plans are coming together for the New England Writing Projects Annual Meeting, which we are hosting this year on April 9-10, here in Storrs at the Nathan Hale Inn. All eleven NWP sites in New England are sending representatives. (There were ten New England sites when we submitted the mini-grant proposal, but since then the satellite site at the University of Southern Maine has been made official).

We had hoped for around forty participants, but we are going to see closer to sixty. Buzzards Bay at UMass-Dartmouth is sending ten participants, and even the two Maine sites are each sending one Teacher-Consultant. Including Jane Cook and myself, around ten TCs from our site will be participating in at least one day of the meeting.

Jane and I will be giving a presentation on Friday about the work we have done to promote and use technology at the CWP. We’ve given some version of this presentation the last two years at the New England Association of Teachers of English (NEATE) annual meeting.

On Saturday we’re really fortunate to have a presentation from Paul Oh of the NWP and Andrea Zellner of the Red Cedar Writing Project at Michigan State University. Paul and Andrea are making a presentation on social networks and teaching. Andrea will be joining us via videoconference from Michigan.

On Friday night we’ll be collaborating with the Creative Writing Program to hold an Open Mic in the CLAS Building. The plan is to have students from Denise Abercrombie’s creative writing classes at EO Smith High School join undergraduate and graduate students from UConn, and kindergarten through college teachers from all the participating sites read their poetry at the event.

Stacy DeKeyser to Speak at Recognition Night

Currently the office has been abuzz with Sharlene, Shawna, and Ben organizing the submissions to Connecticut Student Writers. Last year submissions dipped slightly below the one thousand mark, but this year we were able to climb back above one thousand. Reading Day is next weekend, the twenty-seventh, and soon the magazine will be in production.

One big change this year is that we will not be holding the Recognition Night in Jorgensen Auditorium. Jorgensen will be closing in early May, right after final exams, for renovations. Basically, the building needs to be made compliant with current fire code regulations. So we will be holding the event in the von der Mehden Recital Hall, which is a much smaller venue but that should be just big enough for us. Von der Mehden holds 470 people, and last year we had 430 people RSVP for Recognition Night, so we should just make it! Lizzie Searing and Taking Care of Tummies will still be catering the event, so good food can be expected, but the lobby of von der Mehden is much smaller than that of Jorgensen, so we’re hoping for good weather that will allow folks to spill out into the open air.

This year’s keynote speaker will be young adult novelist Stacy DeKeyser. Stacy’s novel Jump the Cracks has received many recent accolades and good reviews. The book received the Connecticut Press Club Award for Best New YA Novel, and was just nominated for a Truman Readers Award, which is presented by the Missouri Association of School Librarians, and interestingly is decided upon by the votes of middle school readers. Stacy ran workshops for the CWP last year at the Student and Teacher Writing Conference.

Barry Lane Coming to the Summer Institute

My last piece of good news for this week is to announce that the CWP will be bringing author Barry Lane to the summer institute this July 8 (tentatively). We used Barry’s Discovering the Writer Within two years ago and are very excited to have him come work with the teachers this coming summer. This was important to me because I feel I put so much emphasis on secondary and college instruction—that being where my experience is—and I really wanted to do something more for the elementary school teachers this year.

By the way, we are still accepting recommendations for the Summer Institute. Email me the name and contact information of any teachers you think qualified!

Snow Days

2010-02-10T21:43:00.000-05:00

Last night I thought it would be fitting to write about snow days. That idea seems moot since the big storm missed us. I just plowed my and my elderly neighbors’ driveways, even though the snow is still coming down and I will just have to do it again tomorrow.

I was hoping we were going to get hit with a lot of snow, that I could spend the day outside with the kids. I thought we’d build a snow fort at the back of the driveway where my plow had piled up snow, and then go down to Windham Center School and sled on the hill in back. Not so. We were able to drive across town to our friends’ house—also teachers with young kids—to drink coffee and let the kids run around. If they were disappointed to not have more snow, they didn’t show it. Last time we had a storm, Cormac asked me to build a fort. I spent an hour shoveling and packing and then hollowing out a cave. He played in it for twenty minutes before deciding he was too cold; he went inside, changed into warm clothes, and curled up with hot cocoa and a book.

Last night, I tried to think of my earliest memories of snow storms and school cancellations. Before I entered nursery school at the age of three, I used to spend my days at a neighbor’s house. Her name was Helen. My parents lived in my mother’s parents’ basement, and Helen was the next door neighbor. She watched several neighborhood children. I have surprisingly good memories of being watched by Helen. One of my strongest memories is of getting angry with my mom for bringing me to Helen’s on the day of a snow storm. My mother was a first grade teacher who usually left for school early. On this day my mother got me bundled up to go for a walk along the sidewalk. I recall the snow towering over me. I thought she had no school that day and would be spending it with me. She must have merely had a late opening, and what she did was walk me straight to Helen’s house to drop me off for the day, and I remember feeling as if I had been tricked and getting really angry with her.

I have a similar memory, without the anger and trickery, of walking down tunnel-like passages of snow a few days after the Blizzard of ’78. I was almost nine.

My elementary and middle schools were right next to each other, and the elementary school had a good sledding hill I recall going to after a few snowstorms. We could start at the playground and sled right into the woods. Madison was a pretty wealthy town, and I knew many kids whose families went skiing throughout the winters. They’d come to school on Mondays with their ski passes still attached to their jackets. It was popular to leave them on all season to show off how often you went skiing. My family was not well off, and I never went skiing. My friends were mostly from modest backgrounds, too, and the things I remember were playing hockey on a couple of nearby ponds and hiding behind stone walls to throw snowballs at cars. That and trying to ride our dirt bikes on the ice. Just dumb stuff, other than the hockey.

In high school my friends and I did really reckless stuff in the snow. We would go street skiing by holding onto the back bumper of someone’s car while wearing our dress shoes (Catholic school dress code!) and driving down poorly plowed streets that had a good covering of ice. Or we’d go driving on the back roads in the Naugatuck Valley. My buddy Jack had an old convertible, and he’d drive with the top down and deliberately spin the steering wheel so the car would lose control and plow into a snow drift. If we left our seatbelts off and he car hit just right, we might get launched out of the car and into the snow bank. Believe me, I think about those things now and am amazed at how stupid we were, and how lucky we were that none of us ever got killed. Every now and then I hear about high school boys getting hurt or killed in some dumb stunt, and I think, “There but for the grace of God …” I also try to let my memory give me empathy for those boys who do such stupid shit.

Nowadays I mostly dread snow days because I feel like I get behind in my work, I spend a disproportionate part of the day removing snow, and my wife and kids just end up losing another day off in June. They seem like more of an inconvenience than anything else. At the beginning of our teaching careers, we were living on the campus of a boarding school in Simsbury and I was commuting each day to Hebron. On snowy days I would have to leave extra early to get to work on time, and one day I got all the way to RHAM High only to find that school had been cancelled. This was before we all had cell phones.

UConn was late to close today, and I found myself thinking about when I was an undergrad and there was less sensitivity to commuters. Seems like the campus never closed then. I would trudge across that field to Arjona in the worst kind of weather. I had a couple of courses in rooms with fireplaces, and on snowy days I would fantasize about classes held beside roaring fires. Of course some poor student would have had to haul wood and another would have had to get the fire going, and it was probably too hot by the fire and too cold on the other side of the room, but I liked the fantasies nonetheless.

Remembering The Catcher in the Rye

2010-02-03T21:50:00.002-05:00

My cell phone rang last Wednesday while I was getting coffee. It was a student who wanted to know if I had heard that J.D. Salinger had died. As the day went on, several more former students contacted me to express their sadness at his death, or to speculate about unpublished work that might exist. Several of us spent that evening posting our favorite quotes from The Catcher in the Rye on one another’s facebook walls.

I loved The Catcher in the Rye and the Glass family novels from the moment I read them as a junior and senior in high school, and I loved teaching Catcher and the stories from Nine Stories to my students. I never knew Catcher to fail with any students, high school or college, male or female, low level or high. One year I couldn’t find enough copies in the book room, but the students had heard so much about the book and wanted so badly to read it that they found copies on their parents’ book shelves and in the public library, and a couple even went out and bought their own. The New York Times sponsored a blog about Salinger and Catcher, and I read a lot of negative comments mixed in with the mostly good ones, but those negative sentiments didn’t agree with my experience as student or teacher. Maybe there is some testament to my teaching in this, but honestly that novel just always seemed to strike the right chord with every student.

The young woman who called me did not read Catcher when she took American Literature in high school. Her teacher didn’t assign the novel, and she felt cheated, so she read it on her own while her best friend read it in my class, and we would talk about it outside of class. Or sometimes she would sit in on her friend’s class and join our discussion. Years later she read it again in college, and this time she had a professor who assigned a paper on the novel but then never discussed it. So she volunteered my services to her classmates, and I met informally with her and a couple of other students to have the discussion they never had with their professor. Our lunch-time meeting looked like something from a coming of age film. We sat at a picnic table on campus beneath an old oak tree, drinking coffee and talking.

Years earlier I had a similar experience with Catcher and my brother, who is seventeen years younger than me. He was a freshman in high school and had the hockey coach for honors English. That guy was a great coach, let’s put it that way. My brother loved to read, and so I gave him a syllabus of books, from Classical works like the Iliad and Odyssey to contemporary stuff like Catcher and On the Road. I remember driving around in my car one day from Hamden to Windham, bringing him to stay with me for a couple of weeks in the summer, and just talking about Catcher, about Allie and the baseball mitt, about the title and the Robert Burns poem that it derives from. Two years later my brother would read the novel again for his American Lit teacher, Mr. Shread, who was also my American Lit teacher almost twenty years earlier, and the person whom I first read the book with.

Mr. Shread was a great teacher and a little quirky. We had all heard from the seniors how he was going to make a big deal out of reading aloud the passage where Holden finds “Fuck You” scratched into the stairwell of his sister’s school. This was Catholic high school, so saying or reading the word “fuck” in front of your students was supposedly scandalous. It was almost as if the moment of Mr. Shread’s reading aloud the word were supposed to be some sort of rite of passage for us, from boys to men, a demarcation point to commemorate the end of our junior year and our entry into our final year of high school. I think it was also supposed to make Mr. Shread look cool. It didn’t, really, but we mostly liked the guy anyway, so that was OK.

At that time, my parents had gone through a terrible divorce. I had gotten moved around a lot and was estranged from my father but not feeling very close to my mother or my new step-father, either. My new step-mom was Jewish, and so now I was part of a blended Jewish-Catholic family like Salinger or the Glass children. And I also had a good friend who was sick with leukemia and would die the following year from the disease. It also didn’t hurt that I had spent the summers between the ages of seven and twelve living with an aunt just outside of New York City, and so I knew Manhattan pretty well, especially the area in and around Central Park, where so much of the action of the novel takes place. So The Catcher in the Rye didn’t just speak to me; it practically sang to me.

The following year for Sister Rosemary’s AP English class, I wrote my big term paper on Salinger after having read “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish.” I read the rest of the Nine Stories and the four novellas, and even did research on Zen Buddhism to better understand the Glass children. I wish I knew where that paper was now.

The copy of the book I teach from is the same copy I read in high school. It has all my marginal notes from when I was seventeen, and many more written since then. The white space around the text looks like a crazy palimpsest. And the binding is pretty shot now. I have to hold the book in place to keep pages from falling to the floor. In fact, I remember Mr. Shread’s copy looking much the same way.

Dictionaries and Vending Machines

2010-01-27T14:00:00.001-05:00

Down the hall from my office are soda and snack vending machines, and both are notorious for stealing money. The Coke machine sometimes just takes your $1.25 and gives you nothing in return. The snack machine typically has food get stuck somewhere in its descent into the bin. The lucky undergrad who finds a stuck bag of Fritos can sometimes win two bags for the price of one by purchasing one of the same item and hoping it falls in such a way as to knock down the stuck bag. Yesterday I walked out of my office when I heard the snack machine being assaulted. I saw four undergraduate girls attacking the machine. One rather long-limbed girl looked as if she were trying to scale the side of the machine. She was standing at its side, feet planted wide, knees almost embracing the ends, hands clasping both upper corners. I realized she was trying to get enough leverage to tip the machine forward—while her three friends stood in front of the machine, alternately banging, punching, and pounding on the glass. If the long-limbed girl ever got sufficient leverage to tip the machine, she would surely bring it down on top of her more conventionally-limbed girlfriends.

I walked over to the assailants, stood aside in case the climber succeeded in her attempts to tilt the machine, and asked them (rhetorically) if the machine had stolen their money. All three girls in the pathway of doom replied at once. Apparently, not only had the first bag of Doritos they had attempted to purchase gotten stuck, but the second and third bags they had attempted to purchase in the hopes of knocking down the previous bags had also gotten stuck. There was now a stack of Doritos bags right about at the girls’ eye level just taunting them by its refusal to fall. The long-limbed girl was still at it, and so I asked if they had ever heard of the Darwin Awards, which are awarded each year to “those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.” Basically, the award is given to people who unintentionally kill themselves in the most absurd ways, like the guy who tried to kiss his pet scorpion. When it stung him in the face, he got angry and tried repeatedly to force the now terrified and defensive animal to accept a kiss. It stung him repeatedly, and he later died from the poison. None of the girls had heard of it before, so I explained what it was, and I pointed out that I distinctly recall reading about one young man who won the award by pulling a soda machine down on top of himself. The girls seemed incredulous at first, but the climber was sufficiently credulous that she stopped wrestling the machine. I assured them that I was serious, and then left to finish my errand. I could hear them resume their banging, punching, and pounding of the glass, but no more tilting or climbing.

So I chose to share this odd story because of something I read in the paper this morning, and which inspired me to propose that we develop and grant a similar award in the field of education, maybe call it the Dewey Award or something like that, and give it to the educator(s) who make the most boneheaded, educationally unsound decisions each year around the country. We’d have to have a separate category for idiots who seduce their students, or else they would dominate the awards. It seems like we have had at least a half dozen of those in Connecticut alone just in the last couple of years. But I digress. This award would be solely for educators who make unsound educational decisions—poor pedagogical or administrative decisions, not just stupid personal decisions that impact education.

Anyway, I have my first two nominees. They are Linda Carpenter and Linda Callaway. Mrs. Carpenter is the Principal of Oak Meadows Elementary School in Menifee, California, and Linda Callaway is the Superintendent of Schools for Menifee Union School District, Mrs. Carpenter’s boss. David Kelly of the Los Angeles Times reports that last week a single, unidentified parent called Oak Meadows Elementary School to complain about the inappropriate content of a book being made available to students in the fourth and fifth grades. The book? Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. The parent was particularly concerned about the dictionary’s definition of oral sex. I checked. The entry reads “oral sex, noun, oral stimulation of the genitals: cunnilingus, fellatio.” Now an isolated complaint from a single parent is not uncommon, especially about sex in a book (I still can’t get my mind around why I never hear of complaints about violence) but Mrs. Carpenter’s response was uncommon. She ordered that the offending books be removed—“temporarily housed off location”—and that a committee “of parents, teachers and administrators” be composed to meet and discuss “the extent to which the dictionaries support the curriculum, the age appropriateness of the materials and its suitability for the age levels of the students.”

I should know enough by this point in my career to not be aghast, but I am. They are banning the dictionary. Fortunately the school board president has called the decision “absurd,” and others have come forward to protest the decision of the principal. I particularly like one quote from Peter Scheer of the First Amendment Coalition. He said that when you ban books “eventually you end up with a library that is empty or partially full of dumbed-down or redacted versions of books. … Given what’s on television, let alone the internet, it is refreshing that students are actually looking up sexual terms in a dictionary. … At the end of the day, if my kid is digging through the Merriam-Webster dictionary to find words he and his friends are going to giggle over but along the way find other words they will use, I think that is a day well spent in school.”

Tracking My Ambivalence

2010-01-20T22:26:00.001-05:00

I’m very ambivalent about the State Department of Education’s proposal to eliminate tracking. I was talking to one secondary colleague from Mansfield and another who teaches elementary school in East Hartford who are both supportive of the decision. The dyed-in-the-wool liberal in me is supportive, but I have my reservations about practicality. I spoke with my mother last night about tracking. She recently retired after thirty-six years as a first grade teacher, and she’s very much against the move.

My first memories of tracking come from first and second grade. My first grade education was very much a product of the times—1975. Ridge Hill School in Hamden had six classrooms that opened onto a common amphitheater-like pit. All students in the first, second, and third grades were together, as in a Montessori school. And we were placed in groups according to our abilities. I was in Mrs. Davis’ homeroom with all first graders, in Mrs. Plummer’s Language Arts class with a mix of first and second graders, and in Mrs. Oates’ Math class with all third graders. I was very intimidated in that class, and my mother had me moved to Miss Rochford’s Math class, where I was one of three first graders with mostly second graders. Other than my brief time with Mrs. Oates, I thrived in that environment.

At the end of first grade my family moved to Madison, where students were grouped more traditionally, and to my mother’s great surprise I was placed in a special education class for students with severe learning disabilities. When she demanded to know why I was placed in this class, the administrators told her that the placement was based on my score on a standardized assessment I had taken in the spring of the previous year. When my mother demanded to see the exam, she noticed immediately that I had completed the bubble sheet by making geometric patterns. Turns out that the teachers in my previous school had made me take the exam with the older students while most of the other first graders were brought outside to play. The teachers must have told me I could join the other first graders when I completed the exam, and so I just made squares and rectangles and trapezoids and the like on the answer sheet. I would remember this experience years later when I first read Mike Rose’s Lives On the Boundary, in which he recounts a year spent misplaced in a low level track.

So I feel as though even these earliest of personal experiences demonstrated for me the benefits and the potential atrocities implicit in any system that sorts or tracks by ability. And I see this now with my own children, who are three and six. My daughter now and my son before her have thrived in a multi-age Montessori preschool, but my son is struggling mightily in a traditional first grade classroom in a so-called failing school where the focus is on basic reading and math skills, where ELL and ESL students outnumber native English speakers, and where science and social studies have been eliminated from the curriculum and specials like music and art have been reduced to being offered at best once a week and sometimes only a couple of times a month. He is bored and unchallenged most of the time, and occasionally gets bad reports for task refusal. When we ask him what happened he simply says that he hates doing all the baby work.

There is no gifted and talented or enrichment program at his school, though there are various remediation programs funded by state and federal grants, but I agitated enough to get him thirty minutes of enrichment every afternoon with one of two graduate interns from Eastern Connecticut State University. To get this I had to make a Faustian bargain, basically that the enrichment would only come at the end of the day if my son had complied with all tasks during the morning and early afternoon. If he refuses to do what he calls baby work, he loses his enrichment time. I feel like Atticus Finch when he tells Scout that if she agrees to put up with the teacher’s demands he will continue to do real reading with her in the evenings when he gets home from work.

And I think of course about my years teaching high school. I taught many senior electives that were open to students from all tracks, and there was something wonderful about that. In fact, I distinctly recall one girl remarking that she had not sat in a class with some of those students since before middle school. On the other hand, I also taught sections of American Literature at all levels—Advanced Placement, Level 1 (college prep), and Level 2 (basic). And while I was teaching works like The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, Huck Finn, and As I Lay Dying in the AP class, and moving onto a new text every two to three weeks, in the Level 2 classes I had students who simply could not read those books. I would assign short stories by Hawthorne, Melville, and Faulkner, and maybe take four weeks to methodically make our way through Huck Finn. I really don’t know what I would have done had all those students been mixed together in one class. My wife teaches Spanish and Italian, including UConn Spanish, and she has similar concerns. At one professional development workshop at her school, she asked the presenter for suggestions for differentiating a Spanish class in which she might want to teach Don Quijote but would have students who clearly could not read the book, and the suggestion was to put the students into ability level groups within the class. This, of course, is tracking, just done within the four walls of a classroom and hidden behind the façade of a homogenous class.

Anyway, those are my myriad concerns, and I welcome any insight others could give on the subject. I remain profoundly ambivalent.

Race to the Top. Details to Come.

2009-12-18T16:01:00.004-05:00

I was just reading the latest issue of NEA Today. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has an article in there titled “Elevating the Teaching Profession.” In it there is much discussion of the evaluation of teachers and its link to student performance. Of course this subject is a core component of the Race to the Top funds that the US Department of Education has made available to states, which is why Secretary Duncan is talking about it.

Duncan’s article attempts to put a very positive spin on such a controversial subject. He talks about teachers being treated as professionals, being given more support, and being compensated for their work. He also makes the effort to point out that student performance must not be determined by test scores alone. He writes, “Student growth and gain, not absolute test scores, are what we are most interested in—how much are students improving each year, and what teachers, schools, school districts, and states are doing the most to accelerate student achievement?”

Now I appreciate the sentiment and the verbal gesture, but, as the old saying goes, the devil is in the details. I can’t find anywhere—not in Duncan’s article, nor on the US Department of Education website nor on the Connecticut State Department of Education website (which is really difficult to navigate and search!)—any details about how “student growth and gain” is to be assessed other than through the use of test scores. In a Connecticut SDE press release from November 10, Commissioner Mark McQuillan writes that, as part of the Connecticut SDE’s efforts to draw up and submit an application for federal Race to the Top funds, the SDE has formed various committees to research ways to comply with the guidelines for Race to the Top funds. Among these is “an advisory group of education organizations … that has been charged with exploring how Connecticut can best respond to the grant’s call for performance-based evaluations of teachers and principals.” Advisory group. Charged with exploring. How best to respond. The grant’s call for. OK, how many degrees of separation is that from any actual details?

An Associated Press article published this past Tuesday in the Norwich Bulletin describes some of the challenges that New York teachers are facing on this very subject. In a proposal that sounds eerily familiar, the New York Board of Regents offers a plan that “would link a teacher’s job evaluation to student performance under improved tests and as part of a variety of factors.” The article does not make clear what those varied factors are. It sounds as if the New York Board of Regents plan has more details in it than the Connecticut SDE’s exploratory advisory group does at this point in time, but not having seen the actual plan, I don’t know if that’s the case, or what those details are.

I suppose that when it all shakes out I am of two minds on this. Duncan talks about “exemplary teachers [who] toil late into the night on lesson plans, shell out of their own pocket to pay for supplies, and wake up worrying when one of their students seems headed for trouble,” but who for all their toil, pay, and worry are compensated no better than “the weakest teacher” in the school. This sentiment resonates strongly with me. I’m sure I am not the only teacher who can think of a few colleagues who just don’t pull their weight, to say the least in some cases. And it’s a shame they are in the profession at all, little yet that they might be getting paid more than some of us just because they have hung on for years or decades.

But I just haven’t heard anyone offer a viable set of criteria by which to evaluate teacher performance other than student scores on standardized tests, or other student performance factors such as graduation rates. Grades will be deemed too subjective. Administrative observations and evaluations, besides being highly subjective, are just unrealistic. Administrators are so overworked in most cases that they don’t have the time necessary to properly observe and evaluate their teachers. I still remember being a first year teacher and being observed twice by an administrator who then said to me after the second visit, “Look, you seem to be doing just fine. I know I’m supposed to observe you several more times this year, but I have too many other things to do, and frankly, I’m not worried about you. Keep up the good work.” This was a nice compliment, of course, and I suppose something of a blessing. I know many of us would be happy to be left the hell alone by our administrators, and I understand the ‘I have too many other things to do sentiment,’ but it demonstrates the unlikelihood of using administrative observation. I have read articles on peer evaluation committees, but these are fraught with many of the same problems of subjectivity and availability.

So if anyone has some good suggestions, I’d love to hear them, because, honestly, teacher evaluation, promotion, and compensation that is tied to student performance is coming, whether we like it or not. And it would be nice if we, as teachers, could exercise some control over how the state and the federal government are going to measure student “growth and gain.”

Well, the university semester is officially over today. I am done with undergraduates for almost exactly a month (my first spring semester class is January 19). I have grant deadlines, conference proposal deadlines, and a revise and resubmit request on a scholarly article to worry about for the next several weeks. Oh, and the holidays and my daughter’s birthday! So I will be taking a break from this column till the university semester resumes right after the Martin Luther King holiday. I hope everyone has a good break and a successful and stress-free end of the first semester (I know that’s probably a little unrealistic). See you next month.

Marley was dead, to begin with . . .

2009-12-09T22:02:00.002-05:00

When I came home from work yesterday my son came up to me and said, “Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that,” and walked away. I asked him where he learned that, and he told me that there’d been an assembly in school. Fourth grade students put on a production of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Cormac was fascinated with the character of Jacob Marley, and couldn’t stop talking about the fact that the student actors were dressed in heavy winter clothes in the gym. “They must have been hot, Dad!” said Cormac.

Cormac’s fascination with A Christmas Carol brought back many good memories for me. When I was in second grade, a year older than Cormac is now, my grandmother gave me a copy of A Christmas Carol as a gift. She was a dietician but she loved to read. She had floor-to-ceiling book shelves on either side of her fireplace, and they were filled with paperbacks. Her favorites were detective fiction and mystery novels, but she also had a great love for classic literature.

The book was obviously advanced for me, but I plugged away at it, determined to complete the work. I remember thinking how long it was, and of course it’s not very long at all. I still have my copy of that edition. It’s 128 pages, and Stave One begins on page nine. I fell in love with the story. From that point on, I read it every year around Christmas time. I would hide a candle and matches in my bedroom, and after I was supposed to be asleep I would get up and surreptitiously light the candle and read by its light. The candle was my way of creating some sort of nineteenth-century atmosphere to accompany the text and get myself into the right mood for reading about Scrooge. I did this every year through high school. Eventually I knew the work inside and out, and could quote long passages of it. I also watched every production I could find. My favorites are the 1970 version with Albert Finney, the 1951 version with Alastair Sim, and the 1999 made-for TV version with Patrick Stewart. Scrooged (1988) with Bill Murray is pretty good, too, as is the Muppet version (1992) with Michael Caine in the lead.

The Albert Finney version is a musical with Alec Guinness as Marley. The only thing I don’t like about this one is that there are some odd scenes created for the movie that don’t exist in the novel, like Marley’s ghost taking Scrooge to hell, where it is always cold, like it is in Scrooge’s office. What I really like about the Patrick Stewart version is that it includes many scenes normally elided from film versions, like when the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to see miners working in the moors, and two men living alone in a lighthouse, as well as sailors on board a ship. I don’t know of any other production that shows these things.

Another favorite scene of mine that I have never encountered in any production takes place with the Ghost of Christmas Past, who forces Scrooge to revisit the moment of his estrangement from Belle, the girl who was his fiancèe. Every version of the book shows the scene in which the two argue and Belle walks out, but what follows is that the “relentless” ghost “pinion[s]” Scrooge and forces him to see what Belle has become and thus what he has lost. Dickens’ description of the mature Belle and her almost identical-looking daughter grew more captivating to me as I got older and understood some of the subtleties of Dickens’ language.

The narrator shifts to the first person in describing Belle’s daughter’s beautiful hair, face, and figure as she plays with children that must be hers, as well as perhaps some nieces and nephews. The children climb upon the young woman, encircle her waist with their arms and let loose her braided hair. The narrator says, “I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips, to have questioned her, that she might have opened them, to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush, to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price; in short, I would have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest license of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.” I read that as an adult and understand so much more fully the agony that Scrooge must have felt to witness this scene. And yet we never see it in film. Perhaps it is too erotic and too difficult to convey. The narrative voice would have to be done in a voice-over.

My wife and I also used to go see the Hartford Stage production each year. We used to live in and around Hartford, and before we had kids we had season tickets to the stage, and we went to see A Christmas Carol every year from its inception in 1997 till 2002. Cormac was born in 2003. I think next year he might be old enough to see it and not get scared by the ghosts, but not yet. My almost three year old daughter is crazy and fearless. She could probably go tomorrow and not get scared.

So Cormac has been acting out scenes from the play he saw, and drawing pictures of scenes he remembers. He drew me a picture of Marley’s ghost, and another funny one in two panels, with the Grim Reaper on one side and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come on the other. Cormac said, “The only difference is that one has a face and the other carries one of those things for cutting grass before there were lawn mowers.”

“A scythe,” I said. “How do you spell that?” asked Cormac as he picked up his marker.

I Was Not That Kid

2009-12-02T22:16:00.000-05:00

I was not the most serious undergraduate student. I was happy as an unfocused English major. I took an eclectic set of courses, wandered into most of my classes late, and never brought a notebook. I just stuffed a novel into my pocket and took notes in the margins. I would spend my afternoons ensconced in little nooks around campus, just reading. I had a girlfriend who was a physical therapy major, and she used to get mad at me because she’d be lugging her copy of Grey’s Anatomy to lab classes while I would be sitting under a tree somewhere meandering through a paperback. One of my current colleagues remembers me coming to class barefoot. I said, “Yes, that sounds like something I would have done at nineteen.”

Entering senior year, I was a few courses shy of graduating on time, and I had no idea what I planned to do the following year. I hadn’t even begun to look at graduate schools. I wound up doing the Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates, in large part because it was a one year program that allowed me to defer making a decision for another year. And then, once I completed the program, I went to graduate school at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California because I knew a girl who went there, and she told me I could crash with her till I found an apartment. It was the only place I applied.

So I am always amazed by my advisees. They are so much more focused and serious than I was at their age. They transfer in whole semesters worth of ECE and AP credits from high school, which frees them up to do all sorts of cool things. I took only AP English in high school because I liked only English, and I didn’t transfer any credits from the AP test because I blew it off, even though I had registered for it. By contrast, I had this one advisee come in a couple of weeks ago. She’s a dual degree student in English and Education in the Integrated Bachelor’s/Master’s program, she’s in the Honors Program, and she’s minoring in French. I’ve got another dual degree, IB/M student who’s in the honors program and pursuing a music minor. And another who’s doing an additional Concentration in Creative Writing.

I was not that kid.

A lot of students are not that kid. The Neag School of Education admits twelve students into the English Education program each year. By contrast, the English Department has more than eight hundred declared majors. And in a survey the department conducted two years ago, more than forty percent of those students indicated Education as their first career choice. Roughly speaking, that’s twelve focused students and three-hundred twenty less-focused students. That’s not to say that all three-hundred twenty students are as lackadaisical as I was, but generally speaking the students who get into Neag declare pre-teaching as a major during their freshman year, and apply to the School of Education at the end of the Fall semester of their sophomore year. At the end of the Fall semester of my sophomore year, I was more focused on trying to date my RA than trying to consider a career path.

So in mid-October, as I was meeting with my forty or so mostly over-achieving advisees, I was thinking about all the students who didn’t get into Neag when they applied, or who didn’t get around to thinking about Neag or graduate school or career paths till their junior or senior year. About the more than three-hundred students who think they might want to be teachers but who are not type-A, French musicology minoring, honors students. I wanted to help those students become teachers, because being self-directed at eighteen is no guarantee of becoming a good teacher, and being undecided at twenty-two is no indicator of certain failure, either.

So I wrote up a proposal for a Concentration in Teaching English to complement the English major. It would become the third Concentration in the department, joining Creative Writing and Irish Literature. The idea follows directly on the heels of the University Senate’s approval of the dual degree and my appointment as the advisor to the dual degree students. As it has been for a while, English majors must take thirty credits in the major to earn a BA. Prior to the dual degree, English Education majors needed twenty-four English credits. Now, the dual degree students need thirty-nine credits. Basically, their program of study is a traditional English degree, plus three additional courses. Those three courses are Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers, which I teach, The English Language, which is a grammar course, and Young Adult Literature. Equivalent courses that can substitute for one of those three are Advanced Expository Writing, The History of the English Language, and Children’s Literature.

My proposal was to award a Concentration in Teaching English to any English major who completes the three Neag required courses, and one of the equivalents. This would provide the students with a solid background in the teaching of writing, in the structure of the language, and in literature for children and adolescents, with added emphasis in one of those three areas. It would also funnel those English majors into courses populated mostly by Education students, giving them the opportunity to be exposed indirectly to the field and to reap the many benefits that would come from this exposure. It also would give them something tangible and helpful for their files and thus their applications to graduate school.

I’m happy to say that the English department faculty approved my proposal Wednesday afternoon, without a dissenting vote. Some of the faculty members in Neag have expressed hope that this Concentration can become a model for other departments in CLAS. That’s great, but for now I’m happy to be able to offer something helpful to those students who, like me, take a little while to find their focus.

Great Students

2009-11-17T21:29:00.002-05:00

Many people ask me if I love working at UConn more than working as a high school English teacher, and I tell them truthfully that there are things I like a lot better, like a flexible work schedule not determined by a bell system, but that there are things I really miss about teaching high school students. Namely, I miss the students.

At UConn, I am primarily an administrator with a teaching assignment. I only teach one class a semester and then the summer institute courses, so I typically only have about twenty students a semester. I know many of you are thinking that you’d love to only have twenty papers to grade at any given time. And I agree. I would have felt the same way back when I had 87 to 126 students (my smallest and largest loads, respectively, in twelve years in a high school classroom). But I truly missed students—well, perhaps not all of them but most of them.

But now that I am a few years into the position and have become the official advisor to the dual degree students in English and Education, I enjoy seeing a regular crew of students. At this point, I have around forty advisees, mostly future high school English teachers but also Special Education and Elementary Education students. I meet with them all at least once a semester, and many of them more often than that. And I have several students who have taken more than one course with me, not to mention the many interns, tutors, and graduate assistants that I get to work with in various capacities. I find working with all these students to be one of the most rewarding aspects of my job.

One day last week I had my graduate assistant, my intern, and two other students from my class hanging out in the CWP office talking, not to me, but to one another—talking about books, teaching, graduate school, and other related subjects. I was just in my office area answering emails and feeling proud that my office was a place where all these students felt comfortable hanging out and where students from all different areas of the major could get together to talk about the field of English.

A few days later, my intern and I had lunch together and talked about his work, the novel we are currently reading in my class, and his plans for graduate school next year. The following day having lunch by myself, a former student came by very excited. I had written her a letter of recommendation for an internship, and she wanted to thank me and share with me that she would be working for CPTV this spring, and the internship director had loved her writing sample, which she had written for my class.

The following day I met with another former student to talk about graduate school. This young woman had made a tremendous impression upon me in my Advanced Composition class, and I had written her a letter of recommendation for a tutoring position with the University Writing Center, which she got. She later was assigned to work with a graduate student to run the Writing Project-Writing Center collaboration and to organize a fall conference. She also parlayed this position into some grant work with EASTCONN. Now she was hoping for a letter of recommendation for graduate school. I emailed her about a week later to let her know I had a draft if she wanted to come by and let me know which schools she had decided upon.

So, one afternoon earlier this week I was talking with my graduate assistant about her career goals after she completes her MA. We talked about the Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates and the Alternate Route to Certification, as well as teaching in the community colleges or as an adjunct. We took a break to go get coffee and bumped into the young woman who was inquiring about a letter for graduate school. Coincidentally, she had been headed to my office, so we all walked back together, and it was nice for the two young women to meet and talk because they have such similar interests.

Then, in my office, I let the young woman read a copy of the draft of the recommendation I had written, which she initially thought wasn’t permissible, but I assured her that it was my prerogative to share the letter with her. While she read, I talked with my graduate assistant about something, and when I turned around to see if the young woman was finished, she had tears in her eyes, and she said, “That’s the nicest letter anybody ever wrote about me.”

These are the things I love about my job. I love being around so many smart, interested, and interesting English majors and future teachers. I love being able to help students. I love to hear of their successes and to play even a small role in their accomplishments. They are always so thankful for the advice or the letters of recommendation, but of course they are the ones who write the papers and do the work that earns them my and everyone else’s good opinions, that earns them positions as interns, tutors, graduate assistants, and, ultimately, teachers. The day the young woman who got the position with CPTV came by, I was actually having a sort of crappy day, and her good news, enthusiasm, and sincere thanks lifted my spirits for the afternoon. I was perhaps as appreciative of her as she was of me that afternoon.

This Thursday morning, Jon Andersen, Monica Giglio, and I are leaving for the NWP Annual Meeting and NCTE Annual Convention in Philadelphia. We’re hoping for a great experience. It usually is. The following week the university is on break for Thanksgiving, so I will be taking a brief hiatus from this column till the first week of December. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, and thanks for reading.

Veterans Day and War Literature

2009-11-12T14:11:00.003-05:00

As Veterans Day approached, I found myself thinking about the many books we read in my American Literature course that deal with war and its consequences. Though Huck Finn does not deal directly with war, it’s difficult to study the work of Mark Twain and not discuss the Civil War or Twain’s anti-war and anti-imperialist writings. William Faulkner notoriously lied about his World War I service record but later became a goodwill ambassador for the State Department and won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes in 1955 for A Fable, which chronicles a soldier’s unsuccessful attempt to end fighting in World War I. Hemingway is perhaps the only American author to win the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prizes as well as a Silver Medal and a Bronze Star. His early works, especially The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, chronicle the horrors of war and its aftermath. Even works like A Streetcar Named Desire or On the Road can be read through the lens of war. Stanley Kowalski, if you remember, served in Italy during World War II. One of my students wrote a paper that analyzed Stanley’s behavior as the result of hypermasculine trauma response, a transference of aggressive behavior that is necessary in combat to domestic situations that don’t require force. Jack Kerouac, himself a veteran of sorts, makes On the Road a post-war work when he writes toward the end of the novel that as the indigenous Mexican Indians come to the side of the Pan-American highway to “hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, … they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn’t know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way.”

My maternal grandfather served in the Navy between the world wars, my father’s oldest brother Bobby served in Korea, and my father and his second oldest brother Gordy both served in Vietnam. When I was a boy, I was so in awe of the fact that my father had served in a war that I made him breakfast in bed every year, not on Fathers Day, but on Veterans Day. But for me this time of year is fraught with emotions. The seventh anniversary of Bobby’s death was the other day. He would have been 74. On December 26, my uncle Gordy would be 69, but he died a year and a half ago. And on December 18, it will be four years since I last saw my father. Bobby, Gordy, and my father were three of ten children, they were the only ones who served in wars, and they all suffered from alcoholism. War did not cause their alcoholism, my father’s disappearance, or the premature deaths of my uncles, but when I read about the prevalence among our veterans of alcoholism, domestic violence, and PTSD, I can’t help but see a correlation.

So, on Veterans Day, I find myself mourning the loss of my uncles and the virtual loss of my father. And I find myself frustrated with what I fear is happening to Veterans Day. Maybe this began in 1954 when the day was changed from Armistice Day to Veterans Day, from a focus on the day war ended to a more generalized focus on service. But it seems to me that the day has become less sacred. Just as Christmas has become about making enough retail sales to end the year in the black, and Labor Day is about back to school sales, and Presidents Day is all about car sales to get rid of all that back stock dealers will otherwise have to pay taxes on, Veterans Day has become a commercial celebration. A quick Google search of “veterans day sales 2009” produces 18,000,000 hits, the first of which is for a site called CouponConnector.com/veterans-day. Certainly veterans and their families aren’t at fault for this state of affairs, and it would be easy just to blame businesses and marketers, but the military shares blame in this, too. In an era when military policies prohibit journalists from distributing photos of combat, death, or even coffins, military recruiters flood television and magazines with ads that portray war as a video game or an extreme sport. All I can think when I see these ads is that my father and his brothers did not have fun in war, and they didn’t serve so we could all have a day off to go shopping.

In Book XI of The Odyssey, Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld and praises him as a great warrior, “strongest of all” and almost immortal in life. To this Achilles responds that he would rather be a slave on earth than king of all the dead. In Book II of The Iliad, the Greeks soldiers are struggling, so Agamemnon attempts reverse psychology on the men, telling them it is time to go home. He expects them to say no and rally themselves for the fight. Instead, the men rush for the ships, and the chiefs have to beat them back. But then Thersites, the only foot soldier named in The Iliad, steps forward and condemns Agamemnon, Achilles, and the other chiefs for hording the spoils of war while leading the sons of their homeland to the slaughter. In response, Odysseus beats him down.

This scene always reminds me of Wilfred Owen’s letters to his mother. In letter 480, from January 1917, Owen describes trench warfare in graphic detail. As one of my former professors once said, Owen’s letters show how a generation of British boys raised on romanticized notions of war gleaned from The Iliad and other works believed as they sailed for Europe that they were to be the next Agamemnon or Achilles. The realities of war disabused them of such ideas, and soon they knew that they were Thersites.

A Wonderfully Unproductive Day

2009-11-05T23:03:00.001-05:00

On Halloween we had friends come over for dinner before trick-or-treating. Kim and Tom have three little girls around the same age as our kids. We had a nice night that ended with the five kids sitting on the floor of our living room in their disarrayed costumes, eating their candy, and watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I should point out that my six-year-old son shares with his mother a certain Scandinavian, existentialist perspective on life. They like rainy days and Mumintroll books; they loved the new Where the Wild Things Are movie with all its emphasis on the search for a shield to keep away life’s sadness and loneliness. So, as you can imagine, Cormac loves Charlie Brown and feels sincere heartache over every slight that Charlie Brown endures. Cormac also has a strong sense of justice, and expresses strong opinions about what to do to mean people, such as tie them up or lock them in a closet. Watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Cormac continuously expressed his anger at the mistreatment Charlie Brown receives, and at one point said, “Why is everyone so mean to Charlie Brown? Do you know what I would do if I were Charlie Brown? I’d take all those rocks everyone kept giving me and I’d hit people on the head with them when they were mean to me.” All the adults looked at one another, and then my wife said, “You know, for thirty-nine years I have been watching this film, and it has never occurred to me that Charlie Brown is armed with an arsenal of weapons provided by the very people who persecute him. That’s quite an insight, Cormac.”

Today I had an odd day of poorly timed appointments. I had a late morning doctor’s appointment in Norwich, a make-up following a cancelation on a day my daughter stayed home sick. Then I had to be in Hartford in the middle of the afternoon. I kept finding myself with odd chunks of time between things, spaces of twenty or thirty minutes, too little time to be productive and get anything done, but too much time to fritter away. It was also one of those cool, grey November days that Cormac and my wife love, and I found myself indulging in some of their Nordic pensiveness.

After I got back from the doctor’s office, I had some lunch and threw on some more professional attire for my afternoon meeting, but as I got ready to get into my car I realized that I was leaving way too early. My first instinct was to hurry inside and try to work on something, but instead I walked across my backyard to the stone wall that separates our yard from a large meadow owned by my neighbor. In her field is the remnant of an orchard, a handful of apple trees and one or two peach trees. No one has tended them in years, but they still bear small fruit that’s good for pies or apple sauce. Most of the trees had lost their leaves and stood like solitary sentinels against a wall of larger, darker trees beyond. But one small apple tree still retained its leaves. They were mostly deep red, then orange, then yellow, and still some green at the bottom nearest me, and against the grey-brown distant woods and the yellow grass, the colors of this one tree struck me as beautiful. I sat down on one of the large rocks along the wall and just watched the tree. Autumn birds flitted and sang everywhere as they gathered seeds and chased one another across the steely sky. I sat there for ten, maybe fifteen minutes at most, and just let my thoughts drift rather than obsess about the work to be done today and tomorrow and next week.

At the top of the hour I returned to my car and left for Hartford. The traffic was light, and I arrived there early, with some twenty minutes before my scheduled meeting. So I walked away from the building and out of the parking lot. I walked along Farmington Avenue and admired the architectural detail of the old buildings still standing, and tried to imagine what the neighborhood looked like when it was still residential and the Park River still flowed above ground through the West End. I wandered into a neighborhood I have driven by a thousand times and that I lived near for close to a year right after I moved back to Connecticut from California upon completing graduate school. And I noticed that many of the buildings were marked with National Register of Historic Places faceplates, though I have no idea why these buildings have such significance.

As I spent such a significant amount of my day being wonderfully unproductive, I found myself thinking about the meeting I was at last week for the new Humanities school that will be in Bulkeley High, and how I had written on my draft of the mission statement something to the effect that the Humanities teach us how to be human. But in fact for all my time immersed in language and literature, I get so caught up in all the administrative tasks of my job that I find or make little (or at least insufficient) time for such meaningfulness—like contemplating a beautiful tree, listening to birds singing, or admiring the architectural beauty of an historic neighborhood.

After I was done with my meeting, rather than rush back to my office, I took myself for a cup of coffee at Tisane, up near Prospect Street, and to my pleasant surprise bumped into a friend and colleague who had been at a poetry reading at Saint Joseph College. I was glad to have a reason to sit and talk over coffee rather than just rush off and gulp it down as I drove. I went and got my daughter after that, a little before my time, and thankful for this odd day.

Those Who Can Do More, Teach

2009-10-28T20:45:00.002-04:00

When I was in graduate school at Humboldt State University, I used to read a comic strip in the San Francisco Examiner called Luann. It takes place in a junior/senior high school, and one recurring storyline in the strip involves funny banter that takes place in the faculty room. In one strip, a bespectacled male history teacher named Mr. Fogarty is talking with a guidance counselor named Miss Phelps, and he says, “I wish I could quit teaching and go write a novel.” Miss Phelps replies, “Ah, yes, the ‘frustrated teacher syndrome.’ The art teacher wants to be a great painter, the science teacher wants to do research ….” Mr. Fogarty interrupts Miss Phelps and says, “What’s Mrs. Thorpe want to do?” Miss Phelps replies, “Thorpe? What’s she teach?” Mr. Fogarty responds, “Sex Education.”

In the Prologue to Teacher Man, Frank McCourt’s third memoir, McCourt writes, “In the world of books I am a late bloomer, a johnny-come-lately, new kid on the block. My first book, Angela’s Ashes, was published in 1996 when I was sixty-six, the second, ‘Tis, in 1999 when I was sixty-nine. At that age it was a wonder I could lift a pen at all. New friends of mine (recently acquired because of my ascension to the best-seller lists) had published books in their twenties. Striplings.
So, what took you so long?
I was teaching, that’s what took me so long. Not in college or university, where you have all the time in the world for writing and other diversions, but in four different New York City public high schools. … When you teach five high school classes a day, five days a week, you’re not inclined to go home to clear your head and fashion deathless prose. After a day of five classes your head is filled with the clamor of the classroom.”

Both the comic strip and Frank McCourt’s prologue address the aphorism we’re all familiar with: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. (Sometimes this is followed by, Those who can’t teach, administrate. I say this with all due respect for administrators—now that I am one). And certainly, while I am disinclined to give much credence to such a cliché, there is much truth to the old saying, though Frank McCourt’s observations put it into a more appropriate context. It’s not that teachers can’t, so much as that they can’t find the time or the energy. After all, we were good students once, who not only loved to read but also loved to write, and had at least some skill at the task. That interest and those skills didn’t just evaporate the day we first sat on the other side of the desk. What happened is that we began taking home 100 essays every few weeks and killing ourselves trying to get them read and graded with at least a modicum of helpful narrative response.

However, with all due respect to the recently deceased Frank McCourt, there are, in fact, many teachers who completely dispel this myth of the teacher who can’t, as well as who dispel the notion of the teacher who can’t find the time. There are those among us who toil with the hundreds of papers, who go home at night exhausted only to put in a couple more hours of grading, who go home weekends laden with bags of papers, projects, and quizzes to assess, who assign research papers to be due the Friday before a vacation so that we can spend our vacation grading, and yet who nonetheless still find the time for writing and scholarship.

This Thursday evening at UConn is the Aetna Awards Night, when we will be honoring writers who won contests sponsored and funded by the Aetna Chair of Writing. These include graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students taking UConn English, but it also includes Writing Project teachers who have completed this year’s Summer Institute and who have won awards for their poetry and prose. This year, the CWP Teacher-Consultant Writing Contest had over eighty submissions from almost thirty different teachers from all grade levels, kindergarten through college. We are publishing twenty-seven different pieces from twenty-three different teachers. Three are elementary school teachers, two are middle school teachers, fourteen are high school teachers, one is a graduate student at UConn, two are community college professors, and one is an adjunct professor. Five are former or current Teachers of the Year in their schools or districts. Three have published books of poetry. One has published a work of nonfiction. Five are currently writing novels. One received the PEN Discovery Award for Young Adult Literature in 2007. One had her fiction published in Best New American Voices 2006. One is a published playwright and poet. One is a Freedom Writer. One is a freelance journalist. One has published a half dozen scholarly articles within the last five years. And one received both a Fulbright Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant in the last five years.

Looking over this impressive cast of teachers, I am made to think of a coffee mug given to me when I got my first job teaching high school English. It said, Those Who Can, Do. Those Who Can Do More, Teach. That mug was lost years ago, but I’m thinking I should go online to see if I can order some to give out to my CWP colleagues. I’m gonna need a bunch.

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I just began reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my son, our fourth Roald Dahl book. He loves it, as did I. I bumped into my friend Jon the other day, and he and I were trying to recall when we first read that book. For me, it was during the Blizzard of 1978, which occurred in early February. I would be nine that April. We lost power, and I spent two days reading the book by candlelight in my parents’ living room. A nice memory to have.