Of Pigs and Bees:

Michael Pollan, in his article in the NYT, "Our Decrepit Food Factories," wonders whether the notion of "sustainability" has lost it's meaning now that it's the hip thing to be. He looks at two cases -- massive anbiotic usage in pig farms and migrant-worker bees -- to examine the unintended consequences of cheap food.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/magazine/16wwln-lede-t.html?em&ex=1198040400&en=e7a91eb098532b78&ei=5070

The Super Bowl of High Schools

Mary Tedrowe's opinion piece "The Rankings Game," in Teacher magazine decries our fascination with rankings in public schools.

http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/articles/2007/12/12/14tln_tedrow_web.h19.html?levelId=1000&

So what if you're not always perfrect?

This semester I have asked my rhetoric students to write weekly for ten minutes on a famous quotation. The goal is that it will build fluency and comfort. There's a rough format for their responses: paraphrase, show how it's true (using examples from your life and the real world), then show how it might have some unexpected consequences if we really took it to heart. Sometimes students see that the veneer on common, uplifting, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps quotations is pretty thin, and leaves those who try and fail in a funk. This article in the New York Times talks about the unintended negative consequences of believing in the ubiquitious maxims of perfectionism in the American culture:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/health/04mind.html?em&ex=1197608400&en=12509c9b97c24d7f&ei=5070

Mind over Mind-over-body

In this article, "I'm not really running, I'm not really running," published in the New York Times, Gina Kolata writes "No matter how high you jump, how fast you run or swim, how powerfully you row, you can do better. But sometimes your mind gets in the way." My rhetoric class took a look at this today in class.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/health/nutrition/06Best.html?em&ex=1197435600&en=2dad7bfa34bfa04a&ei=5070

Also, for the students who wrote about teen drinking, and unhealthy choices, here's an article that shows why it's such a confusing and complicated issue, especially for teens.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/09RTEEN.html?em&ex=1197435600&en=3e50e0cff26142c7&ei=5070

Need a book to read?

Here's the New York Times' list of the ten best books of 2007:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/books/review/10-best-2007.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

Need 90 more? Here's the NYT's list of 100 notable books. Get reading!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/books/review/notable-books-2007.html

Freedom of speech

We've chatted in class about some recent freedom of spech issues. Mostly we've considered whether it was right for the university to allow Iran's president to speak, or about Iran's president's right to speak. Here's Stanley Fish's interesting argument about the appropriateness of the University President's introductory remarks:

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/the-administrative-imperative-always-lower-the-stakes/index.html?hp

Fish's theme of the separation of a teacher's role -- between her academic duties and her rights of free speech as an American citizen -- has been a regular feature of his NYT blog. It's a teacher's role to teach thatthere is a controversy, and the history of that controversy, but not to comment on the controversy. Critics will say that "saying nothing" is filled with meaning, is similar to tacitly agreeing with the "evil side." Fish doesn't claim that the teacher shouldn't talk about of the schol buildings, just that she shouldn't use the classroom as a political forum.

A history of the "always academize" theme on Fish's blog can be found here:

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/academicize/

More in the world of writing...

Here are two more articles that I thought you'd find interesting. You might read these while applying your make-up or gelling your hair for Homecoming. May these articles provide ideas for future papers, or just food for thought.

1. Your favorite bands from England might not be coming to America soon... or ever. Find out why here in an article by John Jurgenen, who writes about music for the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118980966247828081.html

2. Seen more fat kids lately? It is caused by Taco Bell or Halo? (or something else?) This article (originally published) in Forbes reports about a new study by the American Journal of Preventitive Medicine. http://www.districtadministration.com/newssummary.aspx?news=yes&postid=48354

Happy dancing!

In the World of Writing...

Young scholars:

Here are links to two articles from today’s Tribune that are interesting in their own right, but also might be helpful with paper topics.

The first one is about the Deerfield parents who have been sentenced to jail for having drinking parties. I think that the response by the high school student (in the middle of the article) is good food for thought. My opinion on her thought is mixed.

The second is about some contradictions in the U.S. about “freedom of speech.” The last line is excellent, and makes you proud to be part of the U.S., even though it might be flawed.

Feel free to comment, or send links to articles that you’re finding of particular interest.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-deerfield_27sep27,0,823191.story?coll=chi_tab01_layout

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-oped0927parkersep27,0,1077543.column

Be careful this weekend. I want to see every one of you safe and sound on Monday morning.

Sentence of the Day Using the Word "Counterdiscourse"

From Pauline Lipman's High Stakes Education (2004):

In the context of organized mass protests again racial segregation, school overcrowding, inequitable resources, school violence, and high dropout rates in Chicago from the 1960s through the 1980s:

In the present, when the status quo has become a new regime of truth, the
history of these social movements for school reform provides an important
counterdiscourse about schooling and social justice and about democratic
participation and activism in redefining social policy.

New Writing Course

One of my English teacher colleagues told me that she's interested in creating a new "remedial" writing course for seniors at our school. She's right in saying that there's a need for a senior writing course to build on the skills developed in the junior remedial course.

But our current junior and senior writing courses do not currently have clear curricula, nor is there vertical alignment between the existing junior and senior writing courses. The debate: add the class now because there is a significant immediate need, or wait until there is clear scope and sequence in place. The potential issue with immediate creation: the new class's curriculum will be set up in the best way that the teachers involved can do it (but without a clear sense of its place in a comprehensive plan for scope and sequence) and will begin calcifying, and will have to be partially or completely redone soon, when the scope and sequence is established.

Robert Hauser, in a recent paper criticizing high stakes testing, articulates a vision of what GOOD testing would be:

It is possible to imagine an educational system in which test-based
promotion standards are combined with effective diagnosis and remediation of
learning problems, yet past experience suggests that American school systems may
not have either the will or the means to enact such fair and effective
practices. Such a system would include well-designed and carefully
aligned curricular standards, performance standards, and assessments.
Teachers would be well trained to meet high standards in their classrooms, and
students would have ample notice of what they are expected to know and be able to
do.

Hauser's point is that this doesn't happen often -- if ever -- in the U.S., so we should be leery of high stakes tests. But he articulates clearly the utopia of a skills-based standards system. I think that if you were creating a class from scratch, you’d better be able to create "such a system" (in which teachers know their goals, kids have clear models, and the assessments build sequentially to help kids develop the specific skills) if you had those things in mind to begin with.

What should we teach?

We're never too far from some official pronouncement of what kids don't know or about what kids should know.



A couple recent classes I've taken for my administrative certificate have given me an expanded idea of the role of education -- for democracy, for the economy, for the pursuit of happiness, for the "expansion of the spectrum of knowledge." My educational law class, especially, has given me a renewed sense of the -- literally -- exemplary role of teachers. Teachers can get fired for shoplifting or sleeping around, if either of those things negatively affects the teacher's effectiveness in the classroom. Teachers are held to a more stringent "standard of care" that Joe Q. Public when supervising kids. Teachers -- really -- must be models.



But my rejuvenated sense of the importance of education and of teachers hasn't helped me know what I should teach in class. Just in English, there is a polite brawl involving several professional Englishy groups who each pretend to be the heavyweight. There are Illinois State Standards in English, there are standards constructed by the National Council of English, and the International Reading Association; there's the National Performance Standards, the ACT College Readiness standards.... And that says nothing about local best practices, district standards, and whatever-worksheets-I-used-last-year.



As you might guess, there's no consensus among those factions, very little common language even. To a new teacher, or a parent, what might be helpful is a clear, jargon-free listing of "what a student should know, understand, or be able to do" when she or he leaves freshman year, sophomore year, etc.



One high school that I know of, Jones College Prep, in Chicago has done something like this. Jones' principal, Don Freund, worked with his staff to produce the "Profile of the Ideal Graduate of Jones College Prep at Graduation," or "grad at grad" standards. On this list, you'll see goals like that graduates will be "able to question the information around him or her ".



Another path to the definition of what should be taught is through litigation about school financing. In "Twenty-five years after Rodriquez: What have we Learned," William Koski and Henry Levin review William Clune's work in defining what an "adequate" education might be. "Adequate," in Clune's work in trying to ensure financial equity in school law cases, is defined as "high minimum outcomes for all students."

"We can think of educational adequacy in relation to the competencies that
adults require to be productive thinkers, workers, citizens, and parents."

"But which subjects should be required in the curriculum and what level of
competency is adequate? It is clear that we do not know precisely which
educational competencies are strong predictors of adults performance, and there
is almost no data base of validation studies to assist us.... At the very least
we might expect to look for competencies in communication such as reading,
writing, speaking, and listening (interpretation of what is being said). Beyond
this, there are a variety of subjects in mathematics, sciences, social studies,
... Then there is a knowledge of the arts, artistic expression, literature, and
culture. Even these do not include the interpersonal skills necessary for
effective functioning."

This leaves me double minded. It makes me roll up my sleeves right now and establish those "competencies in communication." It makes me want to begin thinking about what the "knowledge of the arts, artistic expression, literature, and culture" would look like if it were written down. At the same time I'd predict that ten teachers would come up with ten different versions of what that means.

Personally, I feel like I've been reinventing teaching too long. I want to help create the "Bill of Educational Rights" for students with the best thinking that we can muster right now, and then create "amendments" when necessary.

The Dizzy Fizz Gone Flat

Yesterday, Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller published this article as her first Lit Life column. It's a bloggy column about, "the act of reading." She writes about when she's read a good book:

It's a little bit like the moment you stagger off the roller coaster.
There's a dizziness, a slight disorientation, a fizzy feeling in the belly, as
if you've multiplied the effects of the Cyclone or the Blue Streak or the
Twister by gulping too much cold Diet Pepsi too fast on a summer afternoon. When
you look up from a good book, the world's edges dissolve. Reality, thoroughly
outclassed, slinks away.

Reading doesn't always do that, of course. Depends on the material.
Sometimes it's just road signs and the backs of cereal boxes. But if what you're
reading happens to give you that dizzy fizz, you know you're in for the ride of
your life. Unlike that roller coaster, though, confined as it is to the closed
loop of a rattling track, books never leave you in the place where you started
out. You're somewhere else, somewhere far down the road at dusk, and when you
look back, all you can see are the distant lights of the amusement park, and the
faint, fast-receding sounds of the life you knew.

It reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s famous quote about knowing when something is “poetry”: "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?”

I've recently been thinking a lot about how the act of reading happens in English classrooms in high school. How many teachers help create that dizzy fizz? What kind of teaching of novels encourage that kind of personal and intense relationship with books in which "reality, thoroughly outclassed, slinks away."

I know that in my classroom there has a been a dizzy fizz beginning and I do something "teacherly" that smothers it. What DO we do with literature in the English classroom with novels? I know that my own teaching has veered widely in the past ten years -- close readings, thematic readings, Advanced-Placement-Style new critical readings, readings for ideas, readings that focus on the historical period, readings that focus on what the novel means for us today, readings for style, and -- sometimes -- a mixture of everything. Sometimes that dizzy fizz has gone flat.

Is there a "best" kind of reading for 14-18 year olds? Are there ways of treating texts that gets i the way of the dizzy fizz? Should high school be the place for a different kind of reading? Does NCLB's focus on assessment and "comprehension" get in the way (or obscure) other kinds of more fizzier reading?

Love is not an antidote to Capgras

I came across this today in The Echo Maker by Richard Powers:

"Love was not the antidote to Capgras. Love was a form of it, making and denying others, at random." (268)

"Capgras," for those of us who are not mental health specialists, is a medical syndrome that (according to whonamedit.com) consists of a "delusion that a close relative or friend has been replaced by an impostor, an exact double, despite recognition of familiarity in appearance and behaviour." Mark, in the novel, thinks that his sister is an imposter, pretending to be his sister. And in the section quoted above, Mark's sister Karin is trying to sort out her feelings for her supportive and doting boyfriend. Later, she tells the boyfriend, "Leave me alone. Don't touch me... Don't you see yet? I'm not her. I'm just a simulation. Something you invented in your head." We readers see that Capgras, if not contagious, is more normal than we thought 100 pages earlier. At the same section of the book we see the famous Doctor Weber might be diagnosable, too. Maybe Capgras is a condition of love, or at least "a form of it."

How's that?! Love is a form of creating and denying the other? You mean that, sometimes, you don't really know, or recognize the ones you love? Sometimes you reject them? Hmmm. Disturbing, yes, but not absolutely unfamiliar thoughts.

Distrubing, unsettling thoughts. But such mental disturbance is why we read good books. You think you know what a word like "love" means. You think it seems unambiguous. You think what love means: roses, romance, retirement, or: forbearance, sacrifice, support. And after reading this kind of passage, you begin to realize that your "loving" relationships are much more... uhm... diverse than the original picture you'd created. Maybe we do "forget" and "create." And, after reading, you think that either you're not in love, or love is bigger, or different from, or more unwieldly than what you thought it was before you read.

That's what novels can do: make you rethink what you hold to be natural or obvious.