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.