Sicheii Yazhi

I’ve been collecting posts, videos, etc. related to the copyright controversy in my Del.icio.us account, tagged copyright.

As a writer, English teacher, lover of film and literature, and friend of many artists, I’m very concerned about this issue (as a survey of recent posts here should indicate). However, the more I learn, the less sure I become of which position to take.

I’m semi-clear on a few things:

• The original intent was to provide incentives for inventors and artists to share their work with the public by providing a limited monopoly. This provision was not understood as a “natural” right by the founders, and the concern was more about the common good than the individual inventors and artists.¹
• Current copyright law, wielded less by individuals than by corporations, is restricting the benefits that the commons can derive from art, and it is doing so to an ever greater degree as controls tighten and copyrights are extended.
• Further restrictions on fair use only make this matter worse.
• We (the commons) should be concerned with our collective good, the right to build on the works of others, the freedom of information, and the right to “share culture” freely (as in libre).
• On the other hand, we should also be worried about reducing or eliminating incentives for artists and inventors to create and share their creations. Similarly, we should be concerned about the impact this will have on journalism and journalists.²

When I argue, I tend to argue from this last point. Art, literature, film, etc. … these are vital and important aspects of culture, though you’ll get no argument from me that too much has been co-opted by the corporations.³ Still, the artists themselves are not (and should not be) the enemy. We, the commons, should be interested in their success even as we actively fight against the legal and corporate limitations that have been built around them.

Collectively, I believe we can find a solution to these difficulties, but only if we are focusing on building solutions rather than, or at least in addition to, destroying the problems. If we just storm the walls and tear down the keep, the artists, inventors, and journalists are also likely to be crushed in the process.⁴

One example I applaud is Google’s recently-stated approach to newspapers, saying they have a “huge moral imperative to help.”⁵ I think this approach — the new industries, technologies, and markets reaching out to and working with the existing ones to help them make the transition effectively — is the most responsible one, and the one most likely to bring success to both the artists and the commons who benefit from their creations. I hope to see more examples like this.

1. Ultimately, the goal was to get artists to share so that there would be more works for the commons to build upon, thereby improving the common good. The incentive, though directed at the artist, was to indirectly further the common good. [back]
2. The many problems with corporate media’s “infotainment” approach to journalism is also a huge problem, but one I’m not going to address here. Still, the fact that we need good journalists, and that good journalists need to be paid for their work if they’re going to be able to do it well, should require no argument. [back]
3. The AP’s recent insanity surrounding fair use by bloggers is an excellent worst-case example of the problem. [back]
4. And, for the frauds and sell-outs, that might be fine … but for the rest? I’m not willing to destroy the many for the sins of the few. [back]
5. Google CEO: “Moral Imperative” To Help Newspapers - Media on The Huffington Post [back]

[I realize this post is long. If you'd rather read this post as black text on white background, you can use the "Print This" link to view the post in that format without actually having to print.]

In an earlier post, Humanities and the DY/DAN Method, I linked to Dan Meyer’s blog and his take on assessment and homework in the mathematics discipline as a way to start thinking through similar issues in terms of the English discipline.

In this post, I want to clarify what I mean by “the English discipline” and, related, what I think the goals of an English class are (or should be) at the secondary level. It might also be good to consider what the goals aren’t. This is nothing new or revolutionary, just my take on it all.¹ In a later post, I’ll write about some ways to move students toward those goals and to assess whether or not they’ve reached them.

However, I won’t be developing much of a classroom-ready system in these posts, and don’t have the ability to test it even if I did, since I’m not currently in the classroom. I’m offering my idealistic take based on my experiences and the benefit of a year away. Maybe someone can do something useful with it (which could include proving me wrong).

Of course, trying to define “the English discipline and ways to assess it” in a few blog posts is foolish, or arrogant, or both. Many people, with more brains and experience than I, have spent decades debating this (and centuries debating related questions), and there’s no universal consensus yet. Maybe tomorrow.

On the other hand, I think the ultimate goal of an English class is pretty simple: teach students to read and produce texts. There’s a lot to unpack from those terms, though, and even after all the unpacking, the devil is still hiding in the details of the execution.

Despite all this, I’ll still play the fool, but I reserve the right to revise this later using the phrase “that’s what I meant.” If I’m lucky, the discussion might go further through comments or other reactions.

Skills not Content

English should be approached not as a subject or field of study but as a discipline that focuses on and organizes itself around essential skills rather than a body of knowledge.

The question becomes not “What do you know?” but “What can you do?” After four years in secondary English classrooms, students should — with some skill and with an awareness of the their own ability — be able to read, interpret, criticize, discuss, and produce texts in a wide range of modes, genres and media.²

It’s more important to me that a student be proficient with these skills than that she know about a particular collection of texts, a particular set of terms, or a particular hierarchy of grammatical sins. Of course, this isn’t an anti-knowledge curriculum– skillful doing isn’t possible without relevant knowledge — but the knowledge should serve the mastery of the skills. The development of those skills is central, and everything else should support that purpose.

I think it’s worth quoting Robert Scholes here from The Rise and Fall of English:³

We are not artisans shaping the impressionable minds of our students. We are — or should be — masters of our craft helping others to master it, and human beings of integrity helping others to achieve it in their own ways in their own lives.

I think we may at present be too concerned with teaching the right ideas in the classroom and not concerned enough with teaching the most effective ways of speaking, listening, reading and writing.

The one thing a curriculum in English must do, whatever else it accomplishes on the way, is to lead students to a position of justified confidence in their own competence as textual consumers and their own eloquence as producers of text.

An advantage of this approach is that it’s scalable and adaptable: given a group of students, discover where their skill levels are and take steps to move them to the next level using texts and approaches best suited for those purposes and those students.

I want to clarify, however, that by “skills,” I do not mean reductive, “back to basics” skills, exemplified by units on “writing an effective sentence” or “nouns and pronouns.” Specifics of this sort are, in my experience, best addressed within the context of larger pursuits, namely, wrestling with texts that are relevant and engaging to the student. Instead, I mean the primary skills listed above: reading, interpreting, critiquing, and producing texts.

Texts not Literature

“Text” includes a variety of modes, genres, and media (film, magazine articles, song lyrics, advertisements, television shows, blog posts, etc.), and texts should be selected primarily to support the teaching of the desired skills — serving as effective or deficient models — while still openly acknowledging (though not “preaching”) the other implications (ideological, cultural, or otherwise) of those selections.

This isn’t to say that the texts should serve only as examples. Texts can serve multiple purposes, and one way to effectively organize them is by topics that are relevant to contemporary concerns and interests. This makes for a dynamic canon, and frees us from the “dead white men” syndrome without denying the importance of those works (see below).

This is also why I believe the texts of “pop culture” are the doorway to further developing students’ competency with writing and engaging their interest in texts of all types. As should be clear by now, I don’t agree with those who believe only “serious literature” is worthy of study. And anyway, to a large extent, “pop culture” is culture, and those things not labeled part of “pop culture” are often in reaction to it. Popular texts (in all varieties) provide the primary lens through which culture is mediated for students, and students are already familiar with and interested in them, which makes them well-suited for study.⁴

While I agree that having an understanding of literary history is important, I also believe that history should provide context for contemporary and personally-relevant concerns. History of any kind, taught in isolation as a collection of facts, is uninteresting and, worse, useless — which leads students to the logical conclusion that history is boring and irrelevant. Of course, understood properly, history is fascinating and vitally important. That’s why we should start with texts relevant to the interests and concerns of the now and help students to situate those texts in historically-appropriate contexts. Any other approach is just an exercise in really slow Googling.

We should also remember that any “literary history” we do tell, even when skillfully told, is still only one way of telling the story of text and culture. This should be demonstrated, over and over to students, and ultimately, we should help students to discover appropriate contexts for themselves, along with the relevant critical and rhetorical moves.

I am aware of and concerned about criticisms of a “shallow” curriculum,⁵ where the students never wrestle with anything more complex than a cartoon. That’s not what I’m advocating. I’m arguing that the texts students encounter every day are the ideal starting points for understanding and mastering how to read, interpret, critique, and produce texts of ever-increasing depth and complexity.

Workshop not (Only) Lecture Hall

Placing skills at the center of the curriculum requires that students practice the execution of those skills, examine effective and deficient models, receive guidance and critique relative to their ability, and reflect on their own progress individually and collectively. The class then functions more like an artist’s studio or craftsmen’s workshop, where students produce texts in as wide a range of modes, genres, and media as possible, and where the ultimate test is an examination of the work students produce and the processes they used to achieve it.

On the other hand, direct lecture is, at times, appropriate and necessary, particularly when students require information before moving forward and the process of having students discover that particular information on their own doesn’t justify the time it would take to do so.

A few conditions on lectures:

• Make sure a lecture is the best approach. Helping students discover relevant information for themselves can serve multiple purposes: research skills, plurality of opinion, critical reading skills, etc.
• Make lectures focused and brief, because whatever information is delivered through the lecture should be immediately put to use by the students. The more information you present at once, the more difficult it will be to employ (and thus usefully retain) that information.
• There are effective, engaging ways to lecture. Discover those ways and adapt them.

However, approaching a course as a workshop or studio requires establishing an appropriate environment. At least four major concerns need to be addressed if this is going to work:

• Safety: Students must feel safe enough to exert genuine effort and to share the results of that effort.⁶
• Value: Students must feel that their interests, opinions, and efforts are valued by the teacher and by the majority of their classmates. By maintaining rigorous standards for the work students produce, we give value to the work. By allowing legitimate choice in what the student pursues, we give value to the student’s interests and opinions. By actually caring about the student’s success, we give value to the student’s efforts.
• Integrity: Teachers must mentor academic truth and integrity in their approach to students, texts, and the texts students produce, and they must require that integrity in response.⁷
• Space: A workshop approach will not work in a classroom where desks are arranged in long rows with the teacher’s desk taking a position of command in the front or threat in the back. Also, put generally: the space should be arranged for the kind of work you’re doing in it,have the tools you need for that work, and feel like the kind of place you’d actually like to work in.⁸

I realize this kind of environment is not easy to create or maintain, but I still think it’s necessary.

Process not (Only) Product

The workshop model implies a focus on the process, not on the product exclusively. If we believe we have a craft to teach, then the how of this craft is just as essential as the final what. This is true for both reading and creating texts. After all, it is in the doing, not the having done, where learning occurs, so process is where/when all the real work occurs. The products are the aftermath. This is not to say that products should never matter, but from an educational perspective, they matter mainly in terms of what they reveal about how to improve our process the next time.

However, I don’t want to suggest that there is one process to follow (the writing process, for instance). Instead, process merely recognizes that interactions with text, either in their production or their consumption, does not happen all at once. It involves moving from concept to critical investigation to expression to refinement; from reading, to interpretation, to criticism; from disorganized collections, to selection, to arrangement, to presentation.

Therefore, certain responses — from both teachers and students — are appropriate at one stage of the process that aren’t appropriate at another. Students need to recognize this in terms of how they work with texts and how they respond to their own efforts and the efforts of others. Teachers need to recognize this in order to offer appropriate and effective critique and help the student move successfully from stage to stage, skill level to skill level.

All of this is tied directly to assessment, but I’ll say more about this in the follow-up post.

Open not Closed

I mean a lot of things by this. For one, teachers hide too much from their students. English class shouldn’t feel like a sadistic game: the teacher standing at the front of the room, ready to punish, asking students to guess hidden answers to obscure questions without offering any advice on how the answers might be discovered or evaluated, other than by the say-so of the teacher. If they don’t already believe that we know what we’re doing (and so, buy into the game) then they soon become convinced that we don’t know what we’re talking about (and so, rebel) or that they are the hopeless problem (which is expressed either through disdain or despair).⁹

Assuming that we do know what we’re talking about (ahem), then we need to be honest and explicit about the reasons behind whatever we’re asking students to do … which means we need to have reasons, and they better be good. Good reasons are ones that don’t waste students’ time. In part, this means having a clear purpose grounded in sound pedagogy and tied to an appropriate skill. It also means giving them every opportunity we can for them to explore and invest their efforts in topics that matter to them.

Related to the above, we should encourage student-generated texts that have, whenever possible, an authentic audience, a real purpose beyond the classroom, and a genuine appeal to the students’ interests. It’s here, more than anywhere else, that I see the power of online technologies to benefit the teaching of the English discipline.¹⁰

Another remedy is to provide students with the critical and rhetorical moves they need to help them enter the work of the discipline while making that work as explicit as possible. Too often, we hide the mechanics of “how” texts are decoded and produced. Instead, we should be giving them all the tools and showing them how each one works. In other words, don’t be afraid to be provide formulas with the goal of moving students beyond these formulas as their skills develop. To quote Gerald Graff: “If we refuse to provide such formulas on the grounds that they are too prescriptive or that everything has to come from the students themselves, we just end up hiding the tools of success.”¹¹ On the other hand, please don’t beat up and enslave your students with these formulas: they’re steps, training wheels, meant to be left behind.

Similarly, make the questions of and conflicts within the discipline known to students and invite them into the conversation. Most students love a good fight, so show them some. Don’t know where to start? Select a few articles from either side of the music and copyright debate, then decode the texts, pull out strategies, talk about academic integrity, and away you go.¹²

Finally, we need to help students to recognize why we hold the standards we do for what they produce by inviting them to determine standards based on their own work with texts. This collaborative approach to standards doesn’t mean we’ll have lower standards that vary from class to class. We are (or should be) the master craftsmen and women, and we can guide students to recognize aspects they miss. We can also scale these aspects to their current level of ability. However, if we don’t involve them in this process, not only do we reinforce the “us and them” tension in the classroom (which is even less helpful in a workshop setting), but we also miss an opportunity for students to genuinely practice their critical skills and become invested in the quality of their own work.

Craftsmen not Priests

First, to any female readers: I apologize for the sexist terms, but “craftspeople not priests or priestesses” just doesn’t roll nicely.

This last section is brief, as it wanders a bit from discussing the English discipline specifically to my own ideas about teaching generally. Still, I think these are important.

An English teacher’s primary responsibility is to teach students to work effectively with texts; teachers should not be using texts to promote ideologies — political, religious, aesthetic, or otherwise. I’ve seen rifts develop in a classes based solely on ideological conflicts between teacher and student. To me, this shouldn’t even be a possibility. Certainly, there are academic truths, schools of theory and criticism, and controversies within the discipline that can inform our practice and become the subject of study, but we aren’t there to indoctrinate students into any ideology other than the primary ideology of the discipline: reasoned argument from multiple perspectives.

Additionally, English teachers should be practitioners not just theoreticians — they should do what they teach. That means they should work with academic integrity and be effective readers, interpreters, critics, and producers of texts in a wide range of genres, modes, and media.¹³

Finally, teachers should be reflective observers and researchers of their craft, working from clear pedagogy, not mandates. They should be aware of information relevant to their field specifically (textual theory, history, production, and consumption) and generally (education, learning, creativity, etc.).

What Did I Miss?

These are the principles that matter most to me (except for the ones I forgot, of course). I’ll also admit I never held to these principles even half as well as I should have. They’re not easy, which is part of why I think they’re worth pursuing.

I would appreciate any reactions, here or elsewhere, to this list. I’ll try to connect these principles with specific goals and assessments in a later post.

1. Outside of my own experiences in the classroom, my thoughts have been strongly influenced by Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, Tom Romano, Barry Lane, Don Gallehr, Gerald Graff, Sheridan Blau, Robert Scholes, the National Writing Project, and the many excellent teachers with whom I’ve worked over the past nine years. [back]
2. Robert Scholes calls this a “canon of methods,” and much of this comes from his writing on this subject. [back]
3. These quotes are presented out of order. [back]
4. Related, I’d recommend reading Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You. [back]
5. Related, see The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein and “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (The Atlantic) by Nicholas Carr [back]
6. Peter Elbow wrote about this extensively. [back]
7. Scholes defines academic truth and integrity as: “accuracy in citation, regard for what is already known about our subject, and rigor in situating and interrogating whatever material we are considering” — The Rise and Fall of English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 57. [back]
8. I’ve written about the importance of physical space before here and here. Also consider Michel Foucault’s work, particularly Discipline and Punish. [back]
9. If I’m being kind, I attribute this to a desire to keep things simple for students on the one hand (not confusing them with things they don’t need to know) and to keep things from being too simple on the other (not encouraging their laziness by providing them with the answers). If I’m not so kind, I attribute this to a desire to protect our position of authority by pretending the answers are known and we possess them, to hide the fact that we don’t have a good reason for asking them to do something, or to avoid the embarrassing admission that we don’t know the answer and aren’t sure if anyone does. [back]
10. Blogging, collaborative work, manipulation of image and sound, etc. [back]
11. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) 11. [back]
12. See Gerald Graff’s Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993). [back]
13. This is one of the guiding principles of the National Writing Project: the best teachers of writing are teachers who write. Also, I wrote about this in “Teaching is Consequential“ [back]

Paul Krugman has an op-ed piece entitled “Bits, Bands, and Books” in The New York Times today about the influence of digital content on existing business models. His focus is on “books.”

The basic argument is that, as it becomes easier to duplicate and distribute digital content, the ability to make money from that content will fall. Eventually, income will have to be generated indirectly. In his words (in which he also quotes Esther Dyson):

Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”

He then turns to examine books more specifically, considering the potential impact of e-books. He comes to this conclusion:

Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors’ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission.

I think this idea works just fine for writers of nonfiction (excluding memoirs). I can’t see this working, in any financially successful way, for fiction writers. Except for a few highly successful authors like Stephen King, who’s going to go see a live reading with paid admission? And what “other activities” could apply here, besides “the day job”? As for the ancillary market Krugman references, how would that apply to fiction? I mean, I love Faulkner, but I won’t be buying any Faulkner t-shirts!

Krugman admits as much:

Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything.

The other problem with this is that it’s an implicit admission that an entire segment of the market will simply disappear. Here’s why: the ancillary market has always been part of the business strategy, and it’s called ancillary because it isn’t the primary source of revenue. If “the ancillary market is the market,” in Dyson’s words, then that’s a crushing blow to the market.

He ends with a statement that is unhelpful, but also hard to argue with:

Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

I don’t have an answer, either, but I do worry. Even moderately successful authors are paid a pittance of the current market revenue. What’s a pittance of the ancillary market … ?

I keep trying to understand the position of the “copyright abolitionists,” but so far, I’m still not convinced. Here are a few points I’m stuck on … and there are probably others as well. I think this is an extremely important issue, though, so I’ll continue to learn and think about it.

Freely Sharing Ideas

Thomas Jefferson is often quoted in the copyright debates, particularly this quote:

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

I understand this quote, but I don’t understand how some people use it as an attack on copyright. Copyright law already recognizes that ideas cannot be protected. What copyright protects is the fixed expression of an idea. So, my idea for a story about a couple trapped in a house and terrorized by strangers cannot be protected. The specific expression of that idea, on the other hand, can, whether it’s the film Funny Games or the film The Strangers.

Copyright is Unethical

I’m still struggling with this one. If this is supposed to mean “preventing people from sharing ideas is unethical,” then I agree. But what people mean when they say this, whether they realize it or not, is usually that “preventing people from freely distributing copies of a fixed expression of an idea is unethical” … which doesn’t make any sense to me.

Usually, this argument is closely linked to the argument that “the cost of reproduction is effectively zero.” In other words, since it doesn’t really cost anyone anything to copy a fixed expression, it’s therefore ethical to make those copies without paying anyone anything.

Both cases ignore what I see as a vital part of the equation: namely, the efforts of the creator in creating that fixed expression, his/her right to maintain control and ownership over his/her creations, and the ethical principle of trade. Specifically: this guy spent time doing X … time he didn’t spend doing other things to provide for his basic needs (food, shelter, etc.). Therefore, since I enjoy and/or benefit from X, if I want him to continue doing more things like X, I need to help him provide for his basic needs.

Put differently, I don’t see why people have a problem with the idea of paying some reasonable amount of money to the creators of things they enjoy. I don’t see what’s unethical about a law that requires this to happen.

Before the rebuttals begin, let me say that I understand and agree that current copyright law says more than that and is, in many ways, corrupt. I’m in favor of copyright reform. What I’m addressing is the idea that no sort of copyright should exist at all.

Other Business Models

I think other business models are definitely necessary, but not ones that rely on something other than the original creation to generate the income.

I often hear the argument that musicians can make money from concerts and merchandise. Well, that’s fine if the musician wants to tour and sell T-shirts. But primarily what the musician does is create music. The music itself should be the basis of whatever money is generated. If it’s not, then the musician is forced to become something other than a musician … which kinda defeats the point.

Still Thinking

At any rate, I’ve still got a lot of thinking and reading to do on all this. I don’t have answers, and I’m pretty sure I don’t even have all the right questions yet.

Any recommendations on authoritative books, articles, or studies are definitely welcome.

Poverty crouches on one end of the “education problem,” and on the other end perch ridiculously over-priced professions. One example: the models on Deal or No Deal:

While several of the models said they could live just on what they earn from the show, it shoots only two or three days every three weeks. [Deal or No Deal - Television - New York Times]

As long as models make six figures for holding briefcases (or athletes make seven figures for chasing balls around) while police, fire fighters, and teachers struggle to pay bills, there will be no “cure” for the anti-intellectual movement or the dearth of dedicated, skillful teachers.

So TMAO’s post about his decision to leave teaching has made some waves on various blogs. I’d like to offer some personal perspectives (which he’s not asking for), but I’m not interested in second-guessing his reasons. I’m pulling some quotes from his post as a jumping-off point to respond to a few of his comments and to express my opinions based on my experiences … nothing more. I hope he’ll forgive me for using his words to organize my own.

For point of reference: I taught in Prince William County, a large and mostly-affluent suburban school district.

On Being Supported

I’m not sure the people who proclaim the not-supportedness could even articulate the nature of this not-supporting or how it could possibly be rectified.

I felt unsupported in my job, and I can articulate a number of ways this is so: over-crowded classrooms; administrators uninformed about what the teachers they supervise even do; unfunded initiatives; teacher recommendations about school decisions, county curriculum, and county tests routinely ignored; parents’ desires trumping the conclusions of teachers; etc.

To be fair, there were also a few ways in which I was supported, but that side’s the short stack.

On the Pay

I’m paid pretty darn well relative to my peers, and certainly well enough for an unmarried fellow whose biggest expenses after rent continue to be whiskey, books, and college loans.

That’s great for teachers in their first few years of teaching, but it’s not a model for a successful profession, and it doesn’t help keep people in the profession, especially when people continue growing up and doing things like getting married, taking on mortgages, and having kids. The set pay scale with its small steps and the minimal raises from additional degrees is a recipe for a young workforce with little depth. Couple that with tenure and whoever does stay has little reason to work hard to improve performance. Which is exactly the system we have.

On Being a Good Teacher

I’m not happy unless I’m being the teacher I see in my head, but the process of finding that guy and living as him no longer makes me happy.

Teaching is (or should be) a profession, and professionals should feel that drive to become effective in their field. Unfortunately, there are so little external reasons to do so, and so many external hindrances, that it’s made absurdly difficult for teachers. The students make it hard sometimes, too (see below). Still, teaching is a profession … but it’s only a profession, not social-work, not surrogate parenting, not volunteer-work (despite the condescending commercials and “just work harder” films).

Much of the difficulty here is how much teachers must rely on themselves to first clarify what the ideal should be and then find ways to realize that ideal in practice. That’s another part of what teachers mean when they say they’re “not supported.”

First, there’s no set of professional standards that are commonly recognized. Also, there’s no support (or driving force) for teachers to keep moving toward that ideal.

For example, my school offered $300 a semester for continuing education. That’s about one credit. And the majority of “inservice” offerings were a joke. I’ve never understood why public education does so little to support the continuing education of its teachers.

Here’s another example: the administrator who supervised and assessed my performance as a teacher had no background in my discipline, rarely observed me more than once a year for half an hour, and couldn’t discuss, with any real competency, best practices in relation to my curriculum. Teachers in the same discipline were as stretched as I was, with no common planning time, and so with limited ability to help each other improve.

On Being More Than a Teacher

the kids are, in the words of Don DeLillo, “an open wound of need and want.” There is no free time, no mental energy, no chunk of your finances that cannot be poured in that gaping [wound] like the most potent of Hydrogen Peroxides, a pouring that fuels the kind of consumption that only reinforces the pouring, justifies it, encourages it, emboldens future pourings and the expansion of the pouring into a variety of other areas.

Which is also what I think is meant by the assertion that teaching should be a profession, not a calling. It’s also why the complaint that teachers cannot and should not be responsible for all of this is legit. Teachers are there to teach … or should be. I don’t mean teachers should be heartless, or shouldn’t take the needs and concerns of students into consideration, but teachers can’t heal these open wounds and still teach all the things they’re required to teach. Teachers end up trying to fill wounds that they have no business and no real ability to fill. This is a societal problem, not solely an educational problem.

Best of Luck

I’m always conflicted when I hear about another good teacher leaving the classroom. Part of me is saddened by the loss students in that school will suffer but probably not realize. Part of me is hopeful that the teacher may find identity and fulfillment somewhere else. Part of me is angry that the system keeps grinding up effective teachers and forcing them to leave what should be one of the best professions around.

I still miss teaching … sometimes painfully so. I’ve never missed the educational system. Not once.

Dan Meyer has a famously-interesting perspective on grading and homework. In a recent post, he offers a scenario of a student (Aaron) who has only attended 20% of the classes but whose grade is a C+. This is possible in Dan’s class because he’s only concerned with assessing a student’s comprehension. In his words:

I chase one metric at the expense of all others: a) what the student knows.

The party icebreaker question is this: what do you do with a student who can demonstrate mastery of every standard on the list but has a) completed no homework, b) completed no classwork, c) shown up only enough days to avoid expulsion.

from comment 11

He adds some balance, but reinforces the point later:

Education is called to more than simple credentialing (eg. the College Board’s function with the SAT) but, when it comes to declaring a kid’s entire year a do-over, lack of comprehension is the only justification that’ll satisfy me — not class participation, not active citizenship, not good manners, not compliant behavior, or any of their friendlier, equivalent categorizations.

from comment 30

What interests me is how all this (the attendance/grade issue, but also Dan’s approach to assessment and homework) translates to courses in the humanities in general and the English discipline in particular. Most of it seems to make good sense in terms of the math classes Dan is teaching. I’m not sure it all fits in other disciplines or types of classes. I’m working through my thoughts, but would love to hear from others in the meantime.

Any comments?

For my needs, Windows Live Writer (WLW) is the best desktop blogging application I’ve found.¹ WLW makes it easy to insert elements and format posts, even allowing you to write using your blog’s stylesheet so you know exactly how the post will look once it’s published. I also appreciate the easy access to drafts and former posts, though WLW won’t sync all posts with your blog database as some other tools will. Still, its interface is slick and familiar, its WYSIWYG editor is smart and produces fewer code errors than most others, it communicates well with most blog platforms, and it has a growing selection of plugins to improve its functionality. Importantly, it’s also free.

Before I discovered WLW, I used browser plugins like ScribeFire for Firefox or Flock’s built-in Blog Editor. They’re both nice, but neither are as feature-rich or as slick as WLW. ScribeFire’s best feature is that it can split the browser window and sit on the bottom, allowing you to search, write, and pull text and images right into the post without having to switch windows. Flock’s Blog Editor can do the same thing with the Blog Plus addon, and the Flock browser has the handy Web Clippings sidebar to help you collect text, images, and videos for a post. Unfortunately, neither tool handles images very well and both lack the extended functionality that WLW plugins offer.

For collaborative blogging projects, online tools like Google Docs or Zoho Writer will post the final draft directly to your blog. Being able to access the drafts from any networked computer, view the history of the drafts, and collaborate with other writers are great features, but in my experience, the formatting wasn’t always preserved when the document was sent to the blog. Also, unless there’s a need for collaboration, if I’m going to compose a blog post online, I’m probably going to use the “write” page of my blogging platform to take advantage of any features it might offer.

There are many other tools out there, some free, some not.² One tool I find particularly impressive, and my “runner up” for blog-writing tools, is Zoundry Raven. It’s open-source freeware that lets you manage multiple profiles and multiple blogs, sync all of your posts with the desktop version, and browse posts by categories, tags, links, or images. If you’re a WordPress user, Raven will even manage your pages. Its composing features are rich and work well, and it can even be installed on a flash drive so you can take your posts with you. WLW still wins for its plugins, stability, and the ease of use of its features, but Zoundry Raven’s management features and portability make it a close second.

1. Obviously, if you’re a Mac user, you might not feel the same and will probably opt for Ecto or Mars Edit 2. [back]
2. Deepest Sender (a simple Firefox plugin), Thingamablog, Rocket Post 2, w.bloggar, Qumana, and BlogJet, to name a few [back]

I think (and hope) that we’re moving into a “post-diet” approach to healthy eating. I’m gut-deep in guilt here, but I’m trying. Two videos I watched recently, by two similar-looking guys, added some urgency to the subject and explained why making healthy, informed decisions about what we eat is important individually and collectively … not just a trend for skinny tree-huggers.

The first is a TED Talk by New York Times food writer Mark Bittman. His focus is the global ramifications of the way we eat. His advice at the end of the video echoes that of the speaker in the second video, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, among others. Pollan’s food manifesto, widely circulated by now, is: “Eat food. Mostly Plants. Not too much.” His speech focuses more on the individual ramifications and offers some steps we can take.

Mark Bittman video:

Michael Pollan video:

If these videos make you curious about locally-grown produce, you might start here: LocalHarvest.