Only Hope Was Left

This is a re-post. A friend reminded me of how much I hate the sentiment expressed in the quote I mention below, and I just had to update it for this week. I apologize if you've read this rant before, or if I cornered you at a cocktail party and forced it on you there, but it bears repeating. Content, people. Content. 

I love Twitter. I really do. I follow, and am followed by, lots of talented teachers who are overwhelmingly generous with their ideas and resources. Many of the strategies and materials I use every day come from my PLN, tech-speak for "Personal Learning Network." Consequently, if you are an educator, I will follow, create lists, and share the resources that really kick butt (here are my favorites). 

During my travels in the Twittersphere, I've noticed that many teachers are fans of pithy aphorisms and quotes, mantras that help them get through the day and remind them of why they suffer slings and arrows in order to teach. These affirmations run the gamut from clever and quotable, to the stuff of 1970s Scholastic book fair kitten posters; "Hang in there!" and "If you love your students, set them free" sentiments. 

This week, I was followed by a teacher whose profile description quotes Einstein: 

"I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn."

I am a fan, Einstein, and love the hair, but this quote is total crap. I'd love to be able to find context for it, because I have a feeling there's more to this story. Maybe it was taken out of context, totally fabricated, apocryphal; who knows. The sources, are, unfortunately, deceased. 

According to Wikipedia, the bottomless well [pit?] of open-source knowledge, this quote is unsourced, and therefore dubious. "[I'd keep this part of the quote in but it's unbearably boring, even to me]. No source is given, and none of the other books I saw gave a source either."

Sounds about right. 

Whatever. Let's say Einstein said it and that he meant it the way it reads. I can see how this sentiment would be attractive to teachers, because it implies that all we have to provide is an inviting atmosphere, a bubble of trust and creativity with comfy chairs to cradle students' tushies, and the rest will magically happen.

That's a nice, reassuring, Waldorf-ian sentiment and everything, but I'm not on board.

Hold on, Waldorf stalwarts, don't get your organic cotton panties in a twist. I am absolutely devoted to creating a trusting and supportive atmosphere for learning. But that should be square one, not the basis for an educational strategy. 

Sorry, Einstein, but I teach. I teach stuff. Content stuff. 

I teach at a Core Knowledge School, and the Core Knowledge curriculum is predicated on the crazy idea that we should actually be teaching our students content. I know. Nuts, right?

There are some great explanations of why content matters here, and there's a classic example about how a reading passage about baseball will be much more comprehensible to a kid who knows what a pitcher, shortstop, and outfielder are, but here's my elevator speech:

Remember when you were in high school or college, in that class where nothing seemed to stick? No matter how much you studied? For me, those classes were Ind0-Iranian Mythology and Greek and Roman Mythology. I was overworked (long, not particularly interesting story), exhausted, and frustrated by my inability to keep it all in my head. I did not have enough of a knowledge base to be able to link the stories of Hera's jealousy to Hercules' labors to what it might mean if Atlas shrugged. These stories are all linked, and knowing one story helps me remember another because the details of those stories form a sticky net, like a spider web. Once I have  accumulated enough threads of knowledge, my net is fine enough to catch the new fragments of knowledge that came drifting by. 

And that's when the magic begins. That's when connections across subjects begin to happen, when a reading of Great Expectations can evolve into a discussion of the Victorian Era, Frankenstein, Icarus, the tower of Babel, and Promethius unbound.*

That's how content works. My youngest son, Finnegan, is in third grade, at my Core Knowledge school. Three times a week, he leaves the comfort of his classroom and attends a bona fide history class. Not "social studies," but capitol-H History class. Content. History. Facts. 

This month, he's learning about the Vikings and Rome, Leif Erickson and Julius Caesar. When he gets to fifth grade and Dr. Freeberg's reading of The Odyssey, he will have a context for the journey of the hero, lust for power, and land, and exploration. This might evolve in to discussions of Napoleon, colonialism, and slavery. In sixth grade, when I finally get my pedagogical talons in him, his web will be sticky enough to hold on to Julius Caesar, the geography of the Roman Empire, the literal and figurative meaning of "alea iacta est" and the controversy surrounding the quote "Et tu, Brute?"

I don't mean to dismiss the importance of a warm, welcoming, and safe learning environment; I worry about my students' trust and safety every day, particularly in light of recent events. Students can't take in what teachers have to offer if they feel unsafe or unwelcome.** I do, however, mean to dismiss the empty platitudes conveyed by my colleague's choice of Twitter profile. 

I'm sure she means well, but America's educational system contains enough empty platitudes and kitten posters. It's time to fill our students with some real content, create some connections, and see what sticks. 


*Great Expectations is about a boy who is re-made as a gentleman by his benefactor, and that benefactor plays god when he takes over Pip's life and shapes his destiny. Dickens refers to Frankenstein and the themes Great Expectations shares when he writes, "The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me..." Icarus, like Dr. Frankenstein, was destroyed by his own desire to become god-like, and the people of Babel were rendered unintelligible by their desire to build a tower to heaven. Not much good comes to mortals who aspire to god-like status. Finally, Promethius was punished for tricking the gods and messing with their plans for us mortals, which brings us back around to the beginning, and the subtitle of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, The Modern Promethius. 

**There's a great discussion of this subject in Paul Tough's How Children Succeed.

Trespass Freely and Fearlessly

A teacher emailed me a while back with a great question. I’ve been meaning to answer and there’s no better time than today, when I have five other deadlines to avoid.

Dear Jess,

Here’s my question for today: how much can high school age students benefit from a classical curriculum like the one at my kids’ school?   I love that next year my son will read, for example, Plato, as part of the Great Books type humanities program. That stuff is challenging for even the best educated adults. We chose to transfer our kids this year to [name deleted] specifically because of their humanities program. The other option was having them take many AP courses while attending the nearby traditional public high school. I had nothing like the [name deleted] curriculum back in my high school days, and I only read Great Books stuff on my own, many years after I graduated from college.  So I’m excited for my kids to have this opportunity, but only if it benefits them.

Are “Great Books” relevant for today’s students?  My answer is an emphatic “yes,” and I whip out my favorite quote on the subject, by Michael Dirda: “Classics are classics not because they are educational, but because people have found them worth reading, generation after generation, century after century.”

The argument against asking young people to read great books goes something like this discussion from the Diane Rehm Show. Panelists were discussing the novel Ethan Frome, and a caller said he thought students should not read some books until they are forty, with the life experience and perspective to understand the darker, more mature themes.

While I would shy away from teaching Ethan Frome in the darkest weeks of our New Hampshire winter – just for sanity’s sake, mind you – I respectfully disagree. I have heard this argument among teachers, that Romeo and Juliet is appropriate for middle school, while King Lear is not. Romeo and Juliet concerns itself with the heartache of young love, while King Lear stares down the naked torment Lear finds at the end of his useful life. Students may find connections to their own life in the story of Romeo and Juliet’s love tragedy, but the pain of losing a child and the treachery of the vile Edmund are just too mature for younger readers.

Sure, the familiar may be strange in King Lear, but there is much to offer young people in a story such as Lear’s. My students love the treachery of Edmund, the way he plots against the seemingly perfect and legitimate Edgar. Lovely, bookish, kind, Edgar, who can do no wrong in his father’s eyes. And the tensions runs high as Edmund is overtaken by sibling rivalry and plots to steal a place in his father’s heart – or at least his inheritance.

Or what of Cordelia? The youngest child, who cannot heave her heart into her mouth in order to satisfy her father’s outlandish expectations and is eclipsed by her more rapacious older sisters? Or Gloucester, who does not realize until too late that he has hurt someone he loves, and must find a way to make amends.

No, King Lear is not an easy read. It would be much easier for me to reach for The Hunger Games or Inkheart – both commonly assigned in middle school, and books with entertaining plots, to be sure, but they are…lacking. Reader’s questions are too easily answered. “Of all the virtues related to intellectual functioning, the most passive is the virtue of knowing the right answer. Knowing the right answer requires no decisions, carries no risks, and makes no demands,” writes Elanor Duckworth in The Having of Wonderful Ideas.

It is important that we ask students to read great works of literature because, when we hand them Dickens or Shakespeare, we offer students so much more than a good story. We give them the opportunity to step beyond the safe boundary of the known world and journey into the uncharted territory of challenging vocabulary, unpredictable plot, and shifting perspectives. I’m with Virginia Woolf on this one, “Literature is no one’s private ground. Literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.”

In the end, that’s what I hope I do. I teach my students how to find their own way through a complex and challenging world, and these books are the maps I hand my students.

Great books are literary proving grounds, safe places for students to try, fail, and in the end, find unexpected moments of wonder and pride in their own abilities. Students cannot approach these works lightly; they must brave these works armed with their own experiences and ability to reason, because great works of literature require more than simple retrieval and regurgitation of other’s ideas; they demand feats of intellectual bravery, patience, and trust.

Great books contain more than challenging vocabulary and syntax. Great books contain novel ideas, universal themes, vivid sensory experiences and complex literary construction absent from commonplace works of literature. Great books teach great lessons. When students learn to ask more of the books they read, they learn to ask more of themselves.

All In

A lot has been made this year of the value of marshmallow tests, grit, and character in building a quality education. Every time I open my laptop, someone has forwarded an article or tagged me in a post about about the value of character in schools. When I closed the lid on my laptop this weekend, and finally got around to catching up on my NPR podcast listening, there it was again. Paul Tough, talking about his book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character with Ira Glass on This American Life." Tom Ashbrook, talking about the fact that schools are adding workouts, not for fitness, but for "Attention, Grit, and Emotional Control." I had to retreat to a Freakonomics podcast about how to maximize my kids' (read: my) Halloween candy haul (research for next year). 

Don't misunderstand - I'm not tired of the discussion; I think this focus on character in education is a fantastic turn of events. I'm thrilled. As more and more people come around to the value of character education, I sound less and less like the preachy schoolmarm on a weekend pass from the Big Woods. 

For the past five years, I have been teaching at Crossroads Academy, a school that combines the Core Knowledge curriculum with a core virtues curriculum. I have to admit, I was not totally sure what I'd gotten myself into when I signed the contract for my first year. I figured I'd smile and nod, support the character education teachers in their efforts, and reap the benefits of teaching kids who attend a weekly character education class. It's not as if this is my first brush with Aristotle's Golden Mean, on the contrary - I'm one of the A-man's biggest fans - and I can hold my own in a conversation about prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice. 

But about six months into that first year, I noticed all that "character stuff" was leaking out of character education class and saturating every other subject. It was my students' fault; they opened the floodgates. They talked about Atticus' sense of justice in English class, Achilles' lack of temperance in Latin class, Ghandi's incredible fortitude in history class. This weekend, I was helping my third grade son study for his history test, and he told me that "the conspirators killed Caesar because he was not a good steward of Rome." 

Today, Core Knowledge drives my content, but character education and the core virtues drive my teaching, and my relationships with my students.

Well, most of the time. Like anyone who has been teaching the same classes for a while, I am apt to get lulled into a routine, particularly in November. The clocks have just changed, that certain slant of light has descended on New Hampshire, and it's tempting to coast while I put my energy into writing report cards and recovering from the middle-school super-virus my students gave me last week. After all, it would be easy; my class materials have all those helpful notes and Post-Its in the margins, accumulated over years of discussion, the teacher's manual of my Latin textbook sings its siren call...but drat. Just when I have checked out until after the holidays, my students foil my plans. 

This week, I was hacking away at the huge pile of grading I have to get through before I can actually begin to write grade reports, and I was getting sleepy. In my defense, Latin translations are a huge time suck because my students like to take full and creative advantage of Latin's  relatively flexible word order. Nouns and verbs are never where I expect them to be, and the grading is slow going. Halfway through what felt like the bajillionth Latin test, I came across an incorrect answer, with an arrow pointing to a note in the margin:

"Dear Mrs. Lahey. I know the answer to #4 is incorrect, but I accidentally saw the answer on your answer key, and I did not want to cheat. But I know the answer is "vobis" because "you" is plural, not singular."

Needless to say, I gave her the two points, and promptly checked back in.

I am not naive enough to believe that character education alone can save America's educational crisis, but I do know that this week's headlines are full of bright, well-educated people who have sold virtue to purchase wealth. If character education manages to score some column inches on the front page between Jill Kelley and Lance Armstrong, and authors such as PaulTough and Diane Ravitch are brave enough to champion the cause of character in education, I'm all in. 

Where We Need to Be

It's a bright and sunny day for this Core Knowledge teacher after watching PBS Newshour's report on what really works in literacy education. It's only ten minutes long, but it's well worth a viewing.