Thomas Cole: Youth

I was lucky enough to see Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life series in person this summer. It is displayed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. There are four great paintings in the series. Admission is free. 

As school starts again, I like to turn my thoughts to the painting titled "Youth" because I find it to be an excellent reminder of why I teach the age I choose to, and my favorite of the series. First, note the youth has his hand on the boat's rudder. Take note, teachers. Teenagers value autonomy. We all do, really. Secondly, you'll notice the ethereal palace in the sky. Every kid has a dream. Your job is not to judge that dream but to help them navigate the voyage to the best of your ability. Third, notice the youth has long hair. This is obviously a period piece, but I want to point out that adolescence is usually when people experiment with identity. Don't be overly judgmental. Fourth, notice the journey becomes difficult. Assume everyone is voyaging a difficult path. Act accordingly.      

I hope you all have a great start to a new school year. 

An Enemy of the People

 As many of you are all too keenly aware, this school year was like no other. It also provided some very rich educational opportunities. No, I don't just mean shooting our paper towels into the trash, although that was a lot of fun. A CCP class with juniors and seniors voted to read Arthur Miller's adaption of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Now, it bears to mention that these kids are SMART. Forget what you think you know about academics in a vocational school. The connections they made between the play and COVID-19 were inspiring to watch. Dr. Thomas Stockmann's discovery of harmful bacteria in the town's bathhouses prompts a political battle fueled by the mayor's (his brother, Peter) desire to keep the baths open to a) not ruin the town's reputation and b) continue to make money, in which science offers an inconvenient truth, and unfortunately, people's baser nature wins the day. Not only did students connect the dots on the political and economic connections to national, state, and local government's handling of the virus (to shut down, or not to shut down, etc), but they appreciated other connections as well, such as parallels between Dr. Stockmann and Li Wenliang. 

From a teacher's perspective, teaching this play could have been problematic. My approach was to read the play together and have students blog their thoughts. In retrospect, a podcast was an ideal way to encourage discussion during a year in which classroom discussion proved challenging. Either way, I kept my opinion out of it and let them make up their own minds. 

And they did.

Having Fun and Stimulating Discussion in English Class During a Global Pandemic

I've been teaching in-person since August 19, 2020. My students are masked, and there are plexiglass dividers on each desk. The desks are not arranged in my customary U-shaped arrangement. They are in rows to maximize social distancing. Every period of every day, I spray every occupied desk with sanitizer and students wipe their desks with a paper towel. 

I've decided to put those towels to use. 

At first, we read a novel: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Or rather, I read the narrative and they filled in as voices for the various characters. In case you didn't know it's partly a basketball story. That got us talking about basketball. Pretty soon, I noticed the students (predominately male) started good-naturedly shooting their paper towels into the trash like little sopping basketballs. 

So, around the first of March, I brought in a hoop to make it more fun. We decided to break the class into teams and start keeping score. This lightened the classroom atmosphere considerably. 

Let me digress for a moment. Since school resumed in August I've been struggling to bring the discussion into the classroom. There are several factors working against discussion. 1) students literally have their mouths covered. This is not my anti-mask rant. I understand why they are required. It makes fostering organic discussion difficult. I might also add, it tends to cut down on chatter too, which is kind of an unintended benefit. 2) Each student is literally in a plexiglass bubble. Again, this is not me being anti-PPE. I understand why these barriers are in place, I just want you to understand the challenge it poses to the discussion. 

So, in order to motivate discussion, I modified a classroom discussion "game" I discovered at a CCP teacher's conference at the local community college. I owe a debt of gratitude to a fellow CCP teacher, Elliot Zetzer, who originally designed this game to foster discussion during his Socratic seminar course. I modified it for my purposes. Feel free to steal it or modify it yourself. It works. And it's fun. 

This version is modeled after the NBA. I'm sure you could adapt it to any sport. When I first discovered it, it was modified toward the MLB.

It seems to work best when you split the class into teams and keep score. And it works in classes that have not read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian to be clear.

Each team needs a "team captain" and they start with the "ball. " They have the choice to either pass the ball to another teammate or shoot the shot themselves. By shoot, of course, I mean start the discussion. The rule I developed to discourage "ball hogs" is that everyone on your team must speak at least once until anyone is allowed to speak twice. 

Depending on what they say, students can score a certain amount of points for their team. We have been using this format to discuss classic American short fiction. Some of the stories in our textbook that I have used are Flannery O Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" and Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path." The questions range through recall to interpret style questions. It helps to have a lot of questions ready to help stimulate the discussion. It obviously helps if the students have already read the piece, but have it open during the discussion. I intend to use several more stories with the game, and it could be adapted for poetry discussions, non-fiction, or just about any kind of reading. 

Judgement

Occasionally students wonder what criteria I use to judge a book. Here's one way to respond. 

1.  What would Kurt Vonnegut say?

Kurt Vonnegut created some of the most outrageously memorable novels of our time, such as Cat's Cradle, Breakfast Of Champions, and Slaughterhouse Five. His work is a mesh of contradictions: both science fiction and literary, dark and funny, classic and counter-culture, warm-blooded and very cool. And it's all completely unique.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

2. Is it fake? Is there any authenticity? In other words, how close is the writer to their content? 

Some thoughts….

With the recent rise of memoir, we examine the issue of authenticity. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces cast a shadow on our relationship to memoir. He wrote a story about overcoming drug addiction that he claimed was non-fiction, but it was later revealed to be made up. What is true? A better question may be what is authentic? Consider Frank Herbert’s Dune. Even science fiction set on another planet can have authenticity, especially if the writer spent six years doing anthropological research to feed the realism of his “fake” novel about sand people. Occasionally a book is labeled “fiction” because the events are not true to life (James Frey should have marketed his book as fiction, it’s a good story but not based on truth….essentially he exploited a burgeoning market of readers who were hungry for the facts). For instance The Things They Carried writer Tim O’Brien’s story “On Rainy River” attempts to deliver an emotional kind of autobiography. The writer succeeds in making the reader feel what he felt even if the facts were not facts. Hemingway was famous for writing fiction that was thinly veiled autobiography.. His novel For Whom The Bell Tolls is about freedom fighters during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway himself was involved in reporting events of the Spanish Civil War and was instrumental in raising awareness that opposed and finally toppled fascism in Spain…. Did he fight? Not really… do his characters… yes… so there’s a kind of removed authenticity. His being there in any capacity lends authenticity to the book he never would have achieved had he never left his office. Truth is different from fact, which is different from reality… so what does that leave readers with? The question I often ask of a book is “how close it the author to his/her subject?”

3. Does it help me navigate life in some way? If a book doesn’t help define my own personal values or give me strength to see things clearer or inspire me to be the best version of myself that I can be, then it isn’t going to make a lasting impression. Can the book help me get woke and stay woke? If the answer is yes, then I’m all in. 

4. Does it challenge me? I have read books that were so above my reading level I may have only absorbed 50% of the material. For instance Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy supplied many of the valuable and curious words you see in the margin to the right. Books like Blood Meridian taught me new words because I took the words seriously because I took the novel seriously, as Gordy from The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian suggests we should. Challenges can happen on many levels; here we’re talking about vocabulary, but let’s talk content. Should we read things that challenge our opinions, worldview, etc? YES. Should a Christian read the Koran? Should a liberal read Trump’s books? Should a conservative read Hillary’s? In my opinion, YOU BETTER. Glean some kernel of truth and test it on your TEETH. You know, I want my perspective to be keen … and I don’t want my perspective to be based on shaky assumptions about the world. The truth doesn’t have a side. Read books that help connect you to a larger truth about the world rather than reading simply to fuel your biases.   

5. To what extent is it novel? Novel - “new and not resembling something formerly known or used.”   

Use

An educational implement becomes an impediment unless it inspires a student to voluntarily deepen their own understanding. 

Tests

At their worst tests are justifications for learning, whereas true learning never needs a justification.