an attempt to examine issues from a number of sides in order to find sound reasoning - - TELL ME WHERE I’VE GONE WRONG.

Why Do I Teach This Way?

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 06:00:23 -0600

We either teach basic facts, or we teach skills. We need to teach both, and when we have the opportunity, it’s best to do both. But in my judgment, skills are more important.
In the English classroom, it is possible to skate around skills and give kids all the information they need to pass a test. Instead of requiring them to read the substance of A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, it is much, much easier to provide summaries, hold classroom discussions, watch a video, and occasionally, read a passage or two aloud. Of course, we don’t want to bore them with the actual story, do we? After all, it is a great story, one of the finest stories of 19th Century English Literature, but the language is complex and difficult, and we certainly don’t want to “turn them off” by getting them too bogged down in the language. So we we are tempted to “cut to the chase,” cut to the substance of the story, the delicious substance, and deliver it.
All of that is understandable. I’ve been there. I used to assign reading, but I would then give kids the story in about two or three different forms afterward also. They were quizzed on their first reading, but they weren’t tested further until they’d been exposed to at least one retelling.
And so, we neatly skated around the skill of reading. I delivered courses, grades seven through twelve, from which kids emerged boasting that they had not actually read a single word of required reading all year. I will make it clear, though, their grades were nothing to boast of; part of my students’ grade leaned pretty heavily on reading quizzes. But they could fail reading quizzes, listen in class, and pass tests without too much strain.
Those were fun years. After so many of them failed their quizzes, I did a lot of acting. I dramatized the major events of the story. I engraved them into their memories. I prepared them to watch with care as those events transpired in the video version of the story. When we’d finished viewing, we invariably discussed liberties taken by the actors, directors, and producers. My kids could tell you where the movie delivered an accurate interpretation of the author’s intent, and where it failed. My kids knew the story and loved it.
That didn’t mean they’d read it; their skills for reading more stories like it were woefully lacking. But that’s the way they were taught, and I am not proud to admit it now, but I must be honest. I also must say, those methods are not out of date. They continue to be used to this day.
I will repeat: We are not doing our kids any favors “sparing them the pain” of reading. We English teachers should love and respect the “pains” Shakespeare, Spenser, and Dickens took to turn a phrase. We need to make kids aware of our love and respect, and THAT’S what we must teach them.
And THAT’S why I started making close-reading study guides, and THAT’S why I require in-class reading and completion of them.

Occupy Wall Street: Put the Filthy Rich Where They Belong

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 06:35:01 -0500

It’s good to see this happening. I’ve been blogging in obscurity about the situation for a few years now. I’m glad people are finally becoming as upset about the disparity of wealth and poverty as I am. But it’s time we placed the filthy rich where they belong: at the bottom, not at the top of American society. (See D.O.A. archives.)

The old notion of rich people occupying the upper echelons is wrong. The top of a capitalistic economy in which the “free market” is allowed to run amok is occupied by those who waste the least, save nothing, and drain nothing from the engine of wealth. They raid trash bins and recycle cardboard boxes and newspapers to create living arrangements for themselves. They gather aluminum cans before they get to the landfills. They spend every nickel they accumulate right here in the U.S.A. That nickel is passed on down to the next level and the next.

If “trickle down” really works (and I think it does), the money pools up at the bottom. That is where the filthy rich reside. They are the people who drain our country dry. They don’t reinvest their money in America. America is bottoming out. Who in their right minds is going to invest in it? Maybe they’ll invest in big banks, where they’re still running high-risk, high-return conspiracies, or they’ll hoard their tax savings and participate in short-term schemes overseas, where they can get the biggest “bang” for their bucks. They also jump in corporate jets and fly to Paris for lunch, leaving contrails of pollution behind them. They keep yachts in the Caribbean. They spend large portions of their wealth devising schemes to avoid paying taxes and shelter the rest in offshore banks.

Democrats and Republicans are not guilty of neglect. They have paid very close attention to this situation. They are responsible for it. By promoting corporate welfare and providing loopholes, they have endorsed the reprehensible behavior of the extremely rich.

For a couple of generations now, the political parties have been making decisions about the middle class too. They have not neglected it, oh no. They have targeted it; they have cooperated in devising various means of stripping it dry, supporting plans for outsourcing, raiding pension funds, and cutting health plans, all to keep their corporations “competitive.”

The current state of the American economy is the goal toward which Washington has been working since the beginning of the Reagan era. It is that “soft landing” they’ve talked about so much.

We have landed. They have finally brought us down. Welcome to the barren wastes of Reaganomics.

But I’ve said all this before. Go ahead. Make my day. Take a look in my archives.

Free Proud at Last: Reflections Upon Teaching Nicey-Nice (Revised)

Sun, 2 Oct 2011 10:50:46 -0500

“Free at last, free at last; thank God almighty, I’m free at last.”
So spoke Martin Luther King. So speak I.
At last, I am free from a horrible misconception:
I once thought that a teacher cannot truly soothe the hurt inside the heart of a student, and should not try too awfully hard to do so. In fact, I believed that a teacher might be better off pressing the hurt just a little in order to provoke thought. You can’t press a hurt too hard, and you need to be careful about it. Learning is not always comfortable. I knew that all right, but despite that awareness, I believed that a teacher’s principal responsibility is to force kids to take the initiative helping themselves out of their miserable ruts.
How could I have thought such a thing? How could I have failed to realize that a teacher’s real job is to simplify life, and to make “getting by” easier? Yes, easier, even if it means “getting by” without learning much. There! I’ve said it! Thank God almighty, at last I am free.
Well, you see, I’ve always been a stern instructor. I’ve not been your smiley-smiley, nicey-nicey, pleasant, “Oh, hello! It’s so nicey-nice to see your smiley-smiley, oochie-coochie little facey-face! And how can I make your day a little more ippsy-pippsy, or at least okie-dokie?” kind of guy.
I’ve always been more of a “You haven’t even tried to do what I’ve been asking you to do. Get to work.” kind of guy.
I was also an “I told you so” kind of guy:
“I told you I’d help. Others came and asked. We had plenty of time. I always had time left over. I could have helped. I asked you to come forward for help. I stood right up front in the room and waited for you. I had time left over. I looked right at you. I said, ‘If you need help with any of this, now’s the time to get it. I’m not going to waste my time and yours trying to force you to understand something you’re not interested in learning now, but if you really want to learn, please come on up here to my desk, just as others have been doing, and see me. Come on up, right now, and I’ll make time for you.’
“You smiled mockingly, right back at me, you little piece of filth. You chose not even to think about your work. Maybe you had other things on your mind. Sorry if you did. Sorry if, on all ten or twelve or fifteen occasions when I held special help sessions for anyone willing to ask, you had other, more pressing matters to deal with. Sorry I couldn’t soothe the hurt, if that’s what it was all about. Sorry I ignored you when you told me, ‘I did everything you said I should do,’ immediately after I had pointed out your utter failure to even attempt at least a dozen little steps you could have taken, every one of which was listed in the instructions, printed out in black and white.
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t have time for that crap. I took special, special pains, and worked extra hard to show you your errors. I gave you many, many chances to correct them. I helped people who actually did want to learn, and every one of them did learn, and they’re doing fine, because they and I understand each other much better now, but you were too damn busy thinking about how you hurt, or about how stupid the work was, or about how to get out of doing it, or about your friend’s experimentation with all the new and fascinating experiences coming your way.
“Tough. You failed to do the work properly; you failed to ask for help; now you’re barely passing with a grade you’re not proud of, or you’re flunking the class. I have evidence, in the form of your own work and failure to work, and I have similar evidence of my efforts to teach you. I have your inane, ridiculous, so-called “revisions” of your work, along with evidence of your refusal to incorporate the revisions I made for you.”
There, I’m so happy to have explained how I used to think. I’m glad I have that off my chest.
Now, I’m retired from full-time teaching. I just teach occasionally: summer school, part-time contracts, and long-term subbing. So I have new perspectives. I’m free of my misconceptions. I see the light now, and I just want to say that I apologize, and - -

WAIT! WAIT UP HERE! Wait just a second!! No, I am not!! I am not free!. How’s that for a revision?
No apologies here. Those weren’t misconceptions! Those were convictions! I still hold by them, and will always be held by them.
Teaching right means showing, telling, and prescribing educational tasks. Teaching right means diagnosing learning problems and working a way through them. Teaching right means telling kids, “I told you so. Now grow up.” Remember that cheese commercial, where the hunk of cheese proves to be immature? When it becomes clear that a kid has ignored instruction, it is the teacher’s duty to tell him or her to go back and try again. We all learn by failing. There’s no embarrassment in failure. But we all need to be told when we fail, and particularly when we fail to exercise sufficient effort.
By God, I’m proud to say I really did teach, and always did. A plague upon nicey-nice without honest substance, without true challenges, and without real results!

All Screwed Up on Mother’s Day

Tue, 10 May 2011 09:23:09 -0500

At some time, or other,
We all love our mother.

The above is not true for everyone, for two reasons: 1) The pronoun agreement in the verse is imprecise. We did not all have the same mother, no matter what religion any of us might follow; and 2) Pronoun agreement issues aside, some of us did not get along well with our various mothers.

But I got along with mine. I used to rub her back and scratch it. And there is more truth in the adage for me in particular, which truth I shall endeavor to reveal here:

She would ask me to scratch her back. She didn’t want to saddle me with the responsibility every time her back needed scratching; she wanted my dad and siblings to take turns at the chore. But they were no good at it.

“August, you’re not scratching. Will you please quit? Scratch! Rub! No! Cut it out!

“JoAnn, come here on the couch. Sit here next to your father. August, move over. Be a good girl and rub my back. No! Rub! Scratch! Harder! Oh hell.”

“Lenny! Lenny! Lenny, can you stop watching that TV long enough to listen? Lenny? Oh, never mind, Lenny.”

“Eugene! Come here! Scratch Momma’s back. Yes, that’s right. Yes, you can sit behind me, and … Oh, good. No, up here, over here, see? Oh, yes! That’s it. God, Eugene, you really know how to scratch Momma’s back!”

I was maybe ten, maybe nine, and for some reason, was feeling my mortality one evening while scratching her back, so I asked, “Mom, what happens when we die?”

“Hm?” she said.

“What happens when we die?”

“Nothing.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing happens. We die. That’s all.”

“But what happens next?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nope, nothing.”

And you can imagine how long it took me, as a nine-year-old, to think about nothing! What, my God, oh what was nothing? What did nothing feel like? Was it black and cold and lonely? I asked Mom. She said, “No, it’s like sleeping.”

“Forever?”

“I guess so. There’s no pain. It’s the end; that’s all. Nothing to worry about. Scratch my back.”

And I wondered (and did so for years afterward) why she hadn’t told me some Jesus story, or Santa story, or a story about some god, or I’ve wondered why, as some alternative, she hadn’t brought up the idea that people have about waking up to a whole new universe of existence and oneness with light and, well, as the kids say, “whatever…” I wondered.

The answer was simple: She was watching Andy Griffith on TV. She was caught up in the story. She was putting me off, and while she didn’t want me to worry too much, she didn’t want me to get thinking on some Alice in Wonderland explanation either. And there was another reason she was so intentionally glib: She wanted me to think about it a little myself, because she already had the answer to my next concern.

If I had known then what “glib” meant, I’d have known she was being just that. Whatever it was, I knew her well enough to know what she was being, even if I didn’t have a word for it at the time, and even though I couldn’t understand why she was being it. I waited, and finally, during a commercial, I said, “Mom, I’m scared of dying.”

And that flushed the glibness out of her, for a few seconds, anyway. She said, as she swept me up and hugged me, “Honey, you’re not going to die for a long, long time, but when you die, I hope you’ll be very, very happy about your life, whatever it was. I sure hope you’ll be happier about the end of it than you were about the beginning of it.” And she kissed me, and put me down, and said, “Now scratch right up there by my neck. No, higher. Oh, yes!”

“You mean,” I said. … “Mom? You mean – You mean I was sad about …?”

“You cried all the time when you were a baby. Never stopped crying.”

She was watching Barney Fife putting a bullet in his gun. I didn’t want to watch. I’d seen it. It was a rerun. Imagine that - a rerun, in 1961! So then Barney put the bullet in his gun, and then he put it in his holster, and it went off - BANG!! (I was not watching; I knew it all by heart. I was sitting, scratching, and I was little, and Mom was broad, and I couldn’t see the TV, and my mind was heavily preoccupied, and I didn’t care to see it anyway.) But hearing Mom laugh during an interlude of silence in their dialogue, I knew exactly how Barney was looking at Andy as though he were informing him, “Yes, I know you warned me. Right again, old sport.”

I don’t know where “old sport” came from; it was in my head from some British movie, perhaps. I watched a lot of Robin Hood back then, and I might have picked up “old sport” from that show. I was already in love with Maid Marion, Robin Hood’s lady. I liked her legs. For God’s sake, I was already a “leg man” at the age of nine!

I said, “Mom?”

But she was oblivious to my childish questions at that moment also, and I scratched and scratched, and she was warm and firm, and even young; yes, she was young, at forty-six, or forty-seven.

“Mom?” I said. She gave no reply, but continued laughing convulsively at the antics of Barney and Gomer, so I continued scratching and rubbing her back.

Finally, the whistling started, the whistling of the tune that signaled the end of the show. I could imagine every gesture in time with it. I knew during the tune just when Opie threw a rock into the water. He had a weak arm, and had to put his whole body behind it. Lord, if I were the sheriff, I’d have gotten a bit farther out of the way with that little kid throwing rocks and his fishing pole whipping around. I wonder how many times they had to film that scene.

“Mom?” I asked.

“What? What? What is it?” and she swept me up again. “Thank you honey, for scratching Momma’s back.”

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Mom, I don’t want to die.”

“I don’t want you to die either,” she said.

A few heartbeats and thirty years later, she died. I remember her dying, thirty years later, twenty years ago now …

I remember her beginning to die, in the emergency room. She was having a heart attack. Her noble heart, wounded by scarlet fever in infancy, gallantly pumping, pumping …

“Oh, Mom! Oh, Mom!” I said, a man of forty then, but feeling every bit as helpless as a child at ten. “Oh, Mom,” and I tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come.

“I love you too!” she said, and she survived the night.

A few days later I told her, “Mom, you’ll be home soon. They’ll let you go home, and I’ll take you there, and I’ll clean up your place and we’ll have supper, and – “

“Oh, you think so?” she said, smiling - God, I loved her smile - “You think so?”

“Oh, yeah!” I said.

“I don’t think so, Honey.”

“But –” I said, and no more words came, and I bowed my head.

“I’m old enough to die,” she said, smiling. “I’ve called JoAnn and Marie and Lennie and Butta and Donna and George and Rodie and … ”

“But the doctors don’t know! Mom, they don’t know. Your heart is damaged from scarlet fever, so they can’t even monitor it properly, but you’ve outlived a lot of people, and – ”

“I’m ready to die,” she said, taking me closer to God still; even closer, even closer than the time I’d scratched her back thirty years before. “I’m ready to die,” she said, smiling, only hours before her death. “I’m not afraid of nothing.”

She went calmly in her sleep, from its oblivion, perhaps to a deeper oblivion, and if not to that, then most certainly to a paradise for beautiful souls. Her eyes were closed and her face was serene and still warm when I arrived at the hospital and kissed it. Her lips were still formed into her final word, “Oh!”

And a few short years after Mom’s death, I saw a photo of her in my older sister’s home, a photo I’d never seen before. It was her wedding picture, not her wedding picture with my dad, her wedding picture with the man she’d divorced, her first husband, my older sister’s dad. In it, Mom was slender and had thick, black hair, but she was stern and serious as hell, with black, dark black, riveting eyes. They were undeniably present eyes; the strength of Jesus and Job and Muhammad Ali pierced through the ages into me from those eyes as I looked at the photo.

And, my God, was she beautiful! She was absolutely gorgeous, a “knockout,” as they say. Wow.

And not long after, I came to realize something else …

But before I go any farther, you have to know, they say that all little boys want to marry their mothers. Perhaps you’ve heard that. Well, I know the truth of it.

So here it is: As an adolescent, I fell in love with a beautiful young girl. I was totally unaware of the fact, but she was the very image of the picture I would see nearly forty years later in my older sister’s living room, the picture of Mom at twenty-four with my sister’s father, getting married. In the eighth grade I had never seen, and wouldn’t see that picture for several decades, but I think, unconsciously, I had found the woman I wanted more than anyone on earth. It was my mother!

Well, OK. I know it wasn’t my mother, but to the foolish heart within me, that’s who it was.

This explains a lot of things: conflicts raged in my soul as a young man; indecision about what to do with my life has hounded me right up to retirement from the teaching profession; feelings of imbalance and a twisted sense of purpose have nagged at me for generations.

And then came the day when I saw that picture in my sister’s living room, and I realized that in the eighth grade, I’d seen and fallen in love, not merely with a girl, but with a vision I unconsciously constructed into an idol and committed to worship for life. My mother was still alive, of course, when I was in the eighth grade, but she certainly wasn’t twenty-four anymore. At that time, there was no real resemblance between the girl and Mom, but it didn’t matter. Unconsciously, I’d already found every young boy’s ideal. I’d found my mother for the second time.

This beauty too had riveting eyes. Short, petite, absolutely enchanting, she had a smile that hid her teeth a little, as though she were shy … But she was not shy, and she had such perfectly beautiful teeth, and jet black, dark black, oh, sinfully black hair!

And so, I was instantly and eternally in love with her, and could no more help it than a salmon can help swimming back to die where it had been born.

“Oh!”

That’s why I’ve always been so screwed up!

But I’ll say this much: When I go out, I want to go out like Mom did, angry at no one, at peace with myself, and not afraid of nothing.

Oh, and by the way, that double negative is intentional. Nobody should be afraid of nothing.

Ding Dong, Bin Laden’s Dead

Mon, 2 May 2011 10:58:09 -0500

Which old witch?
The wicked witch!
Ding Dong Osama B is dead.

Well, Yo ho, then.

We jump around and celebrate like a village full of munchkins after only one of two great evils has been eliminated.

Like the strutting munchkins, we are not the nobler for celebrating the destruction of human life. This event should be compared to our execution of prisoners. Let’s just call it a dirty deed that had to be done.

The end of World War II, that was something to celebrate. It was a war with a real end. The Germans, the Japanese, the Americans, the Italians, and all the others involved, called off the killing of one another’s heroes. Not many of our heroes were proud of the killing. Ask them; they were relieved that they could stop.

This killing, this is nothing compared to the work we have left.

Bin Laden was a coward. So are they all, all of the terrorists who gloat at death. We should not gloat. There’s nothing to gloat about when you kill a coward. It’s not over; terrorism has not been eliminated. The killing hasn’t ended. We have more to do, more killing, and much more besides just killing.

This, this is nothing. This is the elimination of one slimy head of misery who exploited and misguided some of the most wretched human beings on earth to commit atrocities for him. He was one of the great inventors and propagators of terrorism. Give him credit for being among the first cowards to take advantage of human despair to the point where he was able to create a literal army of living bombs.

But he was merely one of the cowards, one of the early heads of the beast. There’s not just one more wicked witch this time, my pretty. The beast of wretchedness, misery, despair, and human suffering has grown many more such heads. Terrorists continue to send their pawns to death. Terrorists live on to experience the joys of existence. Terrorists gloat at destruction. They breathe, eat, sleep, and enjoy sex.

The people who explode themselves are not terrorists. We’ve got to stop calling them that. Those people are pawns; the terrorists are the cowards who send them to their deaths and go on enjoying life.

We’ve got work to do, more killing to do, yes, certainly; but we also must destroy the wretched creature that’s growing all these heads. The misery must be destroyed. Let’s celebrate when we’ve lifted people far enough out of that monster so that they don’t denigrate themselves to commit any more atrocities for the cowards. Let’s wait a while with the celebrating, and try not to look like a nation of terrorist goons who just want more blood.

WOHLSI SLAMS REPORTS HE’S RUNNING ...

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 19:01:49 -0500

“I’m not running!” said Wohlsi, directly into the microphone. “I’m just not running!”

But reporters were unrequited, and the provocations issued from the crowd, “Wohlsi, are you running, or not? Wohlsi, I hear you’re running. Are you? Are you running Wohlsi?”

“No! No, I’m not running!”

“But your supporters say you are. They say you have to run,” says the belligerent weasel of a broadcaster into another microphone. The belligerent broadcaster reminds Wohlsi of a certain human resources person he has known.

“No!” responded Wohlsi. “No, Weasel, I do not have to run, and I won’t run! Go have a beer and forget about it!”

The crowd, provoked, suddenly thirsty, and enraged, is said to have screamed, “WOHLS - EE! WOHLS - EE! WOHLS - EE”

“Forget it, OK?” said Wohlsi into the microphone, but no one was listening anymore. “I’m not for anything! Do you understand? I’m against almost everything! I do not want to run!”

At that, the crowd exploded into a phantasmagoric eruption, “WOHLS - EE! WOHLS - EE!”

A NOTE TO THE WORLD:

I AM NOT RUNNING! OK?

SINCERELY,
WOHLSI