More Coffee, Please

Shortly after World War I, American expatriate T.S. Eliot published The Wasteland, a work that came to embody the feelings of the age. The lights had gone out all over Europe, and there was a sense that nothing had changed, that the future didn’t promise hope, but more of the same.

It’s one of my favorite works. It’s a wonderful test of how much one knows—and my kids learn to like it as well. I used to start my classes with Modernism, with Eliot, and it seems fitting that I end with Eliot.

After all—this was one of the tougher blogs to write. I do hate saying goodbye.

That’s a decision that really shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been reading this for very long. Over the last six months it’s become increasingly difficult to find the motivation to write, and the lack of updates reflect that.

There are a number of reasons. First, MRHS has changed, and continues to climb out of the mire. It’s a great deal harder to be a voice calling for something better when almost every day something occurs that will lead to improvement. Nothing will be fixed over night, but the attitude has changed: We’re asking ourselves what we can do to make learning more effective, rather than despairing there’s nothing to be done.

Second, I don’t think it’s a matter of educating those in the district anymore about what’s going on in schools. I’m looking a the current discussions about the budget, and all I can do is shake my head—cut 10%? Really? Knowing that there’s no such thing as an “across the board cut” and that it will have a disproportionate effect on teaching?

But I lack the drive to fight it. When a fool and a fanatic get into an argument, it’s hard to say which is which—and I’ve no desire to be either.

Besides, I’m cynical enough to think that nobody ever changed their mind because of what I wrote here.

And, speaking of cynicism, my innate despair about humanity (held at bay for two or more years) has done a fine job of reasserting itself. I firmly believe that education should lift all boats, but I don’t know that it can help anyone survive a flood of Biblical proportions, and the rain clouds aren’t just moving in, they’re down-pouring. What we see in the classroom is not the result of bad teaching, it’s not the result of problems in the system—though these are present and we will face them, we will challenge them, and they will be met—but the result of decisions of a larger society coming to roost.

I’m teaching at the end of the Roman Empire, and most of my students firmly believe there will be bread and entertainment in the Colosseum, and can’t imagine the idea of barbarians pillaging Rome. Worse, mom and dad are just as lost, and there’s little that can be done when the family doesn’t think there’s anything wrong… and in today’s society, where we flatly reject the idea of truth, or right, or wrong, we’re not going to agree on much—right down to whether or not education is valuable.¹

That doesn’t mean anything much, really, for the way I conduct my classes. I spent the last two weeks after school every day, and at one point had an entire class—save three students—after school with me, making up work. After that effort, I have 6 of my 60 students failing, and the reasons are all the same: Attendance and refusal to do the work.

Both are nothing I can control. If I thought it would matter, I would give an incomplete to every kids and allow them to make up the work—but they won’t. They’ve told me so… “Mr. Hale, I ain’t going to do it. I’d rather fail.”²

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

I’ve set my lands—more or less—in order. But the good fight looks a little different than this, and the race is bringing me in another direction.

I might pick this up again. I’ll certainly keep the domain name—if I ever open a coffee franchise, I know what the name will be. But for right now, it feels finished.

Shantih, shantih, shantih.

1 We are, after all, talking about people who don’t see facts and truth the same way I do. I can point to what I feel are convincing arguments all day long, but when the retort is, “Yeah, but I know a guy who…” there’s not much to be done. Post hoc ergo prompter hoc, but nobody knows what that means anymore. When anecdote trumps fact, when people ignore science and research for belief (without even being able to define belief!) then there’s little that can be done, until pain teaches the lesson. ↺

2 In all cases, neither detentions nor phone calls home worked. ↺

Gregarious

Share This

Zero tolerance = zero thought.

When even school officials admit it’s ridiculous, there’s a problem.

Gregarious

Share This

We don’t have this challenge. The cooks in the cafeteria rock, and though much of it might be reheated, a ton is made by hand, and there’s usually something tasty made by someone with talent.

It matters. You would be amazed at the number of kids who walk into school hungry. When parents are gone before the bus rolls around in order to get to work, there isn’t much in the way of eggs and bacon waiting on America’s table-tops.

Fortunately, MRHS now allows food in the classroom to teacher discretion. I’ve never had a problem with it (though in a lab, that’s another story… let’s not get into the habit of putting things in our mouths in chemistry…) and it allows kids to snack when they’re hungry.

Which just makes sense. Every person I know brought something to munch on to class in college—especially those three hour long sessions.

Gregarious

Share This

6-2 Us. A solid game.

Varsity Field Hockey didn’t do as well. I needed to head home before the game was over, but they looked competitive… though what I know about field hockey could be counted on one hand.

Gregarious

Share This

The last twelve days have been spent dealing with the fallout of the last major assignment—and “fallout” is the best word for it. I was not at all pleased with the after effects of my experiment in assigning real work to my students.

For my college prep students— which is full of kids who represent the top 20–30% of the junior class—fully half of them didn’t do the assignment. Of the half that did, only three or four did it well, earning anything close to a competent grade.

Tempt not a desperate man, children.

The ones that did it right, and the ones that did it poorly, sat down with me individually and we went over the English department rubric and we negotiated a grade. Generally speaking, there were two choices—they did it well, and they were going to get a good grade, or they did poorly. The former were happy and excited, the latter a little less so. But they all reported knowing what they needed to do to fix it.

So I made them. They were going to re-write the essay—not because it was going to change their grade any, but because they needed to do it the right way. You get the grade you earned, and you learn to do it the right way.

And MRHS has given me all sorts of new tools to make sure that happens. In addition to the standard detention, there’s also the learning lab—where they have access to a teacher to help them. They really don’t like the idea of a losing a study hall to learning lab.¹

Much the same deal was struck with the ones who didn’t do it, though they had the option of a slight improvement over a 0 so there was more incentive. We also had a long conversation about what they could have done to not let that happen in the future—why did it occur, what were the proper steps to learn from it, and what shall happen next?

Ultimately, they’re all writing it. They’re all writing it well. It’s like I told my seniors—they’re all walking at graduation, and my juniors are not failing. Not one of them.

Death first!²

One of the things that I love about the “new” English department is the time that is spent getting work done. Too often it’s too easy to give into the temptation to go home and to not spend the time as a team working towards a common goal. Department meetings that go for a half hour do nothing but convince people that there’s no need for department meetings.

So last week, we spent longer than we should have—until after 4—looking at how the year has gone and where we go next. Summer reading was a big part of that discussion, and so was student writing—which I love.

It took a good long while, but one of the things we managed to do was hammer out a really solid set of evaluation rubrics for student essays. I’ve already sat down and used them twice with my classes, and the rubric does what it’s supposed to do—push kids to develop their work more, and to really think about what it is they’re trying to say.

But what was equally valuable is that, for the first time I know of, students will be required to go look somewhere other than a webpage for information. Google and Wikipedia are not going to be acceptable places to go for a research paper. Students will have to dig into the “invisible internet” and take advantage of the resources that they have access to.

Oh. And the rubric makes the damn five paragraph essay pretty hard to justify and use, as well. They’re in high school—they can start writing like it.

At this point, some of my juniors have stood up and spoken to the class for the second time in month. They’ve figured out how to not be horrible at PowerPoint³ and I’ve been really impressed. They’re starting to go above what is required and starting to look to excel. I had two of them make up pamphlets for their presentation, and it was amazing—and yesterday, the last speaker dominated. She had some things to improve on in the materials side, but she spoke well.

And for a citizen in a democracy, that’s just a necessity.

The vast difference between boys and girls continues to stun—and dismay—me.

My first period class was assigned a task as their test on colonial literature—because whenever I can make someone do something rather than regurgitate it, I will. They were to create a two-scene skit about the colonial period that incorporated the qualities of colonial lit that we had been discussing.

We set a schedule. We defined benchmarks along the way—how will you know if you’re on track? They defined the criteria for what it should look like.

Boom, they were off. They split into two groups, along gender lines. Within twenty minutes, the girls were brainstorming, had a plot idea, and were working away. There was giggling, yes, and off topic conversation, yes, but they were working. They were getting it done.

My boys didn’t move from their desks. They stood and waited. After ten minutes of them starting at one another, I asked when one of them was going to step-up and be a leader. One finally did, and they got into a circle… where they continued to stare at one another.

Future of our country right there.

I’m all for women doing well—and they are doing well, achieving more than men in every facet of academics and dominating the college landscape. When I take classes, I’m often the only man in the room, especially when they’re “tough.” However, I firmly believe that in 300 million Americans are going to compete with 1.2 billion Chinese and 1.1 billion Indians, we’re going to need everyone and not just 52% of the population.

Never mind the social problems when those boys don’t “step-up” in their own families. That’s a much longer blog than I have time for…

I had my students read and reflect on this article. I got two responses which were memorable:

I started to read the article, and then got bored and couldn’t finish… just kidding! I had to pick on you. I think that it really has a point…

and

I started to read the article, but couldn’t finish. It seemed too complicated and I didn’t get it.

Guess which student is re-reading the article with me during their lunch? Slacking is not an option. Nor is not thinking!⁴

My tenth grade students are struggling through Antigone right now, which is killing me. I love that play… So we’re going to make a comic, see if that helps the more visual among them. Depending on how we do, maybe I can get it posted up here.

1 Nor should they. Study halls remain a joke—they’re where we put students not because they need time to do the work, but because we don’t have enough classrooms and teachers to give them something to do every period. ↺

2 A cookie to the identifier of that quote… ↺

3 Well, some of them… ↺

4 I might have had more sympathy if the student weren’t ranked in the top 30% of the class. As it is, that was just giving up out of the mistaken belief he/she wouldn’t be called on it. ↺

Gregarious

Share This