Ubuntucat

There’s a lot of pressure out there. It started when I was in ed school, studying to be a teacher. The professors and my fellow student-teachers raved about Harry Potter. When I finally got a full-time teaching gig, all the teachers there raved about Harry Potter. My wife raves about Harry Potter.

Am I the only one who hasn’t read Harry Potter? And does that make me a bad person? After all, there are plenty of great books I’ve read that most Harry Potter fans have never read or even heard of. Are they bad people for not appreciating those books? Why do people give me strange looks when I say I haven’t read Harry Potter?

It’s not as if I never tried to read Harry Potter. I did. I really did. When all the big hoopla in ed school was going on, I thought I’d give it a shot. I picked up Sorceror’s Stone (also known as Philosopher’s Stone) and tried to read it. The first 100 pages were painful. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the writing style. The characters didn’t feel real to me. I stopped. I haven’t started again ever since.

Some people will say this is heresy, but the movies are a lot more exciting to me. Usually I like book versions better, but not in the case of young Mr. Potter.

If you genuinely enjoy Harry Potter, good for you. If you’re one of the flock, who read Harry Potter just because it’s the “in” thing, then shame on you… but at least you’re reading something. And if you want to know what books a non-HP-reader would recommend, try Men, Women, and Chainsaws by Carol J. Clover, Hardcore by Linda Williams, Femininity by Susan Brownmiller, On Writing by Stephen King, or The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell. I guess I should have mentioned I favor non-fiction. Could be one factor in my lack of enthusiasm for Potter books.

Further Reading
Pottermania and other random ramblings

Maybe this is symptomatic of the kinds of social circles I run in, but I often hear friends and acquaintances saying that they are sending their kids (current or future) to public school because they “believe in public schools.”

I’m not sure what this means exactly.

All the people I know who say this, well-intentioned though they are, seem to still reinforce the class system in United States education. None of them sends their kids to underfunded or physically dangerous public schools. Instead, they send their children to charter schools or rich public schools. And then they encourage their children to go to private post-secondary schools.

I don’t see what right these people have to lord it over those who supposedly don’t “believe in” public schools.

I’m a case in point, though my parents were never snobs about “believing in” public schools. I grew up in a rich suburb and went to a very well-funded public school. Then, I went to a private university for my bachelor’s degree and another private university for my master’s degree. So what makes my parents different from those who “believe in” public schools—at least the “believers” I’ve met? Not a whole lot.

I’ve taught in both private and public high schools. I don’t see any practical difference in terms of funding source, but I do see a lot of differences in terms of funding amounts, even within funding sources. Is there some kind of ideological integrity that comes with having loads of money come through taxing rich individuals and then being funneled through the local town or city government… as opposed to having loads of money go straight from the rich individuals to the school itself?

Even if you are a true idealist of this sort and send your kid to a poorly funded public school, what does that prove? What do you gain from that? Will that serve to balance the inequities in our educational system? Are you also going to insist your child go to only public universities and work for only government-funded jobs?

Public is not inherently better or more idealistic than private, and there is no reason to feel you are better than others because you send your child to a public school. I’m so sick of this “I believe in public schools” crap. Am I the only one who hears this? Am I the only one sick of hearing that phrase?

Recently, I read an article in Newsweek espousing single-sex education. The following week, the magazine published a slew of letters arguing for or against single-sex education. The original article itself and all the subsequent published letters all missed two major reasons it’s dumb to argue about whether schools should be single-sex or co-ed:

1. Arguments about whether students get distracted by the opposite sex don’t make any sense and are heteronormative. As a former teacher (of five years) who taught in both public and private schools, I can’t remember a single instance in which I noticed a student not paying attention in class because she or he was distracted by the attractiveness of the other gender. People tend to get embarrassed about that sort of leering being noticeable—young student or adult, in an educational setting or any other setting. People get distracted by their own friends, regardless of gender. They get distracted because they want to whisper to each other and write notes to each other. They get distracted because they’re bored.

More importantly, LGBT students feel marginalized enough as it is. We can’t even acknowledge that, in a single-sex environment, they might be subject to these same theoretical “distracting” longings for the objects of their affection? The argument about whether or not single-sex or co-ed environments distract people has no bearing on practical pedagogy. I’ve sat in far more faculty meetings than I would have liked to, and not once did we talk about a co-ed environment distracting students. We did talk about dress code, but I didn’t see any violations of that dress code actually distract a single student in class. Dressing inappropriately reeks of unprofessionalism and doesn’t suit any school environment—co-ed or single-sex.

2. Arguments about single-sex and co-ed schools tend to make the assumption that it’s either one or the other. Whatever happened to “To each her own”? Can’t we say that some people would better thrive at single-sex schools? Can’t we also say that other people would better thrive at co-ed schools? Arguing single-sex v. co-ed is about as dumb as arguing about whether people should have cats or dogs. Let some people have dogs. Let others have cats.

What do affirmative action and extended time testing have to do with one another? They’re both band-aids. Unfortunately, in popular discourse, there is rarely talk of any sort of weaning process with either.

Now, affirmative action is a complex issue, and if you want to explore almost every nuance of the debate, I’d advise you read Frank Wu’s Yellow. However, there is one essential assumption in the debate that is often not tested: if affirmative action is a good idea now, when will it go away? How will it go away? What steps are we taking to make this not a stop-gap measure but a first step toward the ever-so-lofty meritocracy opponents of affirmative action policies so laud and imagine exists right now? I rarely hear anyone talk about how affirmative action could eventually be phased out, and ideally—even if one believes strongly in affirmative action, as I do—everyone should want it to go away eventually… if it is successful.

One of the basic premises of anti-affirmative action rhetoric is the idea that everyone should be treated the same… not equally, but the same, regardless of race. Now, of course, proponents of this rhetoric rarely want the same treatment for races before college admissions or job searches. God forbid every public school (whether suburb or inner city) should have the same facilities, class sizes, and monetary resources. The other problem with treating the races “the same” in admissions decisions is the fact that they are not the same. There is a problem. To take the band-aid analogy to its logical extension, I’d say if I have a gash on my arm—on only my arm… not my leg, not my face, not my back, not my toe… would it make sense to treat every part of my body “the same” at that point? If I put neosporin, gauze pads, and a band-aid on my arm’s gash, would it make sense that I put all those on my legs, face, back, and toes as well? Is it all or nothing?

The flip side, of course, is that at some point, the band-aid must come off. I will eventually want my arm to be without the band-aid, for,while the band-aid is helpful in the healing process, it is also ugly, unnatural, and outliving of its purpose once the gash beneath it is healed.

What’s more disturbing to me than affirmative action’s indefinite semi-permanence is the indefinite permanence of extended time testing. Now, one fundamental problem with extended time testing and “learning disabilities” or “learning differences” is there is currently, in the U.S., no standard licensing and official criteria for determining whether someone qualifies for being LD (and thence to have “extra time”). This means if someone takes his child to a “learning specialist” who decides the child is not LD, the parent can then go to another “learning specialist” who will decide the opposite.

This first problem is simply a matter of bureaucracy and inconsistency. While it allows individuals to exploit the extended time system, it is not what is fundamentally wrong with extended time. What’s wrong—and I’m speaking strictly from an experiential/observational perspective, not a theoretical/abstract one—with extended time testing is that it never seems to end. The student, diagnosed usually in middle or high school, receives “extended time” because she has “processing issues” or memory retrieval problems. Then, the student gets similar support in college, and I would imagine graduate school as well. It won’t be long before someone files a lawsuit against an employer for not giving her enough time to complete a project.

All the while, educators, learning specialists, and parents reassure the child with a “learning difference” that she is still intelligent, that she just has trouble processing or retrieving information. Unfortunately, being successful in school and in life is about much more than mere intelligence. A lot of academic success comes from the ability to retrieve and process information, to meet deadlines, and to work under pressure. LD students who are used to advocating for themselves nonchalantly tell their teachers, “I have time and a half for this test.” Of course, there are always situations in which students who qualify for time and a half are done in only a couple of minutes past the time. And, then, what do teachers tell students who don’t qualify for extended time when these non-LD students are unable to complete tests in the allotted time?

There are two core issues here. 1. Extended time should be a band-aid at best, so that students who have processing and retrieval issues can slowly find strategies to compensate for those issues and ways to slowly close the gap between themselves and their non-LD peers. 2. Students, parents, teachers, and administrators need to recognize that academic success is about more than just intelligence. Students should, in fact, be rewarded for completing tasks on time. Why else would extended time testers feel an incentive to develop coping mechanisms?

Remember, band-aids are ugly and should be only temporary. They can be necessary for healing, and they should not be applied to every part of the body, but if they stay on too long, they leave sticky rings and wrinkles on the skin.

Even though I’m now getting out of the teaching profession for not-so-idealistic reasons (I hate grading papers, and I like being able to call in sick without huge repercussions), I really do believe teaching literature to high school students has value. Now, here I’m writing specifically about teaching literature. Few people doubt the need for schools to teach students how to read sentences or write grammatically. A lot of people, including many students, do wonder occasionally just what about reading literature makes you think critically.

Now, I’ve read a bunch of bullshit books about the reading of literature that hail the study of literature as the appreciation of greatness. Some of my former English colleagues reinforce this notion as well—that the value of literature study lies not so much in the study of the material as in the material itself. One of my department heads once rejected my request to teach Lady Chatterly’s Lover not on the grounds (as I feared would be the case) that it is too sexually explicit but on the grounds that it “just isn’t that great a book.”

I find this line of reasoning, though prevalent, a bit disturbing. What are we teaching these students to do, after all? I didn’t ever want my students to simply read, in awe, and absorb a “great work of literature.” How does the mere reading of great literature cause one to think critically? And, then, if it does, about what does that reading teach you to think critically? There are several problems with this approach.

First of all, I’d like to make a distinction originally made by Sau-Ling Wong between what she calls literary interest versus what most people call literary merit. If we select books based solely on their literary merit, we encounter first the problem of what constitutes “good” literature. My department head thought D.H. Lawrence not “good enough” to teach, but Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly is a classic, and many would disagree with my department head. The second problem stems from the first: why teach only “good” literature? One could make the case that it is for exposure’s sake that we teach only “good” literature, to follow E.D. Hirsch’s model of “cultural literacy.” While this is a worthy goal, it’s not a terribly lofty one. Instead of teaching students, we could simply give them a reading list: “Please familiarize yourself with all of the canonical books on this list. Familiarity with these works will help you understand references to them later in life.”

I’ve found that teaching books that teachers and students understand must have literary merit has at least three damaging effects:

1. It does not foster in students any practical critical thinking skills, as they believe, since they study and analyze only “good” literature, that only “good” literature is worth analyzing—this is an implicit message we teachers send to students. Thus, when critical thinking is most important (when students are going about their everyday media consumption—advertisements, movies, tv shows, popular fiction, comic books, etc.), students will be less likely to think critically, to question those works that they deem to have less or no literary merit.

2. It forces teachers to exclude works from their curriculum that may have what Wong calls literary interest, works that may bring about the best dialogues, the best analysis, the best discussion, simply because those works are not “great works of literature” (whatever that phrase means).

3. What usually makes a work of literature “great,” apart from simply (by circular logic) being revered for so long, is that it maintains an illusion. Literature is really magic. That’s why writing fiction is a difficult art. That’s why fiction-writing teachers always have to hammer into their students the mantra “show—don’t tell.” Telling is the most efficient way to get across information to a reader (it is what I am doing right now). Showing is the most powerful way to get across ideas to a reader—it forces the reader to experience rather than hear about an experience. “Good” literature creates an elaborate illusion, an anti-Brechtian “Method” kind of reading experience. I’ve found that teaching truly great literature often numbs students’ thinking. They get sucked into believing that what the author has presented as truth is truth—not the author’s own truth or worldview but real, universal, undeniable truth.

A truly well-equipped student of literature will be able to think critically about, analyze, and question not only William Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, David Henry Hwang, Edith Wharton, and Jane Austen, but also Agatha Christie, Helen Fielding, Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele, Alan Moore, and Stephen King. I’m not implying that the latter set of authors is inferior in quality to the former set. Some authors are considered more “popular” and less “literary,” though, and therefore do not “merit” much scholarship. All the better for Christie, Fielding, Clancy, Steele, Moore, King, et al. They won’t have to worry about anyone seeing through their illusions, questioning their assumptions, or thinking critically about the values they put forth.