. . . teach 'em what they don't know how

Transition

2008-05-12T09:59:00.002-06:00

I was in Oxford, Miss. this weekend, and it occurred to me that unless I make special plans to visit, it could be the last time I ever see that wonderful town. I'll be pursuing another M.A. -- this one in Eastern Classics -- in Santa Fe in the fall, and leaving Mississippi in just weeks. I am very glad to have been here, to have done this, and to be leaving. I am very excited to be returning to the West.

Three years ago I was in California -- a year out of college and recently returned from Buenos Aires -- packing and preparing to drive to Mississippi to be a public school teacher. In a few weeks it'll be three years since the Mississippi Teacher Corps required me to start keeping this blog. I've maintained it intermittently, at times abandoning it and returning only to post required entries on MTC-assigned topics. This is the 36th month I've lived in Mississippi, and the 80th post. I taught for a year in the tiny town of Sardis, Miss., where I had the most difficult year of my life; I moved to the capital and began teaching in an "inner-city" school, finished the MTC program and was awarded an M.A. in Curriculum & Instruction from the University of Mississippi; and I stayed to teach a third year. I've taught eight "preps" (or subjects-- nine including summer school), and 400-some students (probably over 500 including summer school-- which from a simplified calculation is about 0.1% of all public school students in Mississippi, or 0.4% of the public high school students).

I've not maintained this blog much better in the year since it's stopped being a curricular requirement than I did when it was; but not much worse, either, and I have appreciated the strange space, and been told by distant people that they appreciated it, too. So I'll try to keep at it, at least as half-heartedly as I have these last three years. But I have been mulling over a change of venue (especially since blogger capriciously ate a few posts), in order to have room for more technical experimentation and a more apparently permanent place. And the timing is good.

This hasn't been a Teacher Corps blog for a year, and in a few weeks it won't even be a teacher blog anymore. So thaumastikos.blogspot.com is closed. For continuity's sake, all of its posts and comments (to date) have been moved to the new digs, and this is the last post at the old ones. Point bookmarks and subscriptions to the new address:

rpollack.net

Online messageboards

2008-04-23T21:52:00.003-06:00

I am not entirely proud of how funny I found these videos to be. You'll only get them if you've ever read long discussion threads at certain message boards or blogs. They're not thoroughly unclassroom-like, either.

Not safe for work, beware.

Impotent demands, impotent defiance

2008-04-15T10:46:00.003-06:00

A small clique of boys show up one morning very similarly (and somewhat thuggishly) dressed, enough that it seems unlikely to have been an accident, and rove down the school hallway, doing I don't know what, intimidating people? But isn't that what they try to do differently dressed? In an arbitrary show of authority they're pulled aside, sent home to change, and the principal tells everyone over the P.A. system that we don't do "dress-alikes" here, you will be sent home, etc. And I wonder, is that a thing?

The next morning -- thanks in no small part, I'm sure, to facebook and txt messenging -- several hundred students show up in red t-shirts. The administration pretends not to notice.

And it's symbolic middle fingers all around, in the cauldron of mutual oppression that is the school building.

Teen slain in Jackson

2008-04-07T23:38:00.003-06:00

This kid went to Jim Hill. I didn't know him but remember his name from the detention list.

Update: Another link.

Follow-up video

2008-04-07T22:53:00.003-06:00

This guy has made his own follow-up video, and the New York Times writes about him.

Thanks to HB for the link.

Today was a very bad day

2008-04-04T17:35:00.005-06:00

Transcription from twitter:

-- In a dark hallway with tons of kids and no power. Tor-nay-duhs on the loose. Been 30 minutes so far.

-- If only we could harness all the power from all the cell phones students sneak past policy...

-- ...almost an hour now...

-- Back in class, still no power, still no lunch, kids getting restless...

-- Lunch was supposed to be two hours ago. Still holding same class, no power. Are they getting the buses? They seem to want us uninformed.

-- It's 3. Same class since 11:40. Nobody's eaten. Weather's cleared. WTF?

-- It is almost impossible to imagine this would be tolerated in an affluent district.

-- 3:21, 9 minutes to regular dismissal. I doubt any instruction has happened in hours. Thanks JPS.

I don't have much to add to that, but that it made for possibly the least pleasant day I've had in two years with JPS. Most frustrating is the sense that we were being deliberately kept uninformed so that we would keep anticipating relief that wasn't in fact to come, and would more likely keep our peace. When a tornado came and took the power from my old (tiny & rural) school district before I came to Jackson, they got the buses and sent everyone home early. There were some whispers of that happening today, but then the weather cleared, and whether for that reason or some other we were held captive and ignorant -- literally in the dark, hallways and stairs becoming dangerous after even backup lighting failed -- until the regular dismissal time. Apparently other schools in the district didn't lose power, so they went back to business as usual, had lunch, maintained a bell schedule. I hope it was not the case that downtown saw the weather improve and then didn't think about or give a shit what our circumstances were, that our local administration didn't represent us to them. I hope there's a better excuse than that.

Also, I wonder what the law has to say about holding kids (90+% of them on federal free or reduced lunch) from 8:20am to 3:30pm without feeding them.

No.

2008-04-04T00:27:00.001-06:00

No.
Originally uploaded by Robert Pollack

That's not what it's supposed to say.

The Contents of Characters v. The Colors of Skins

2008-03-11T20:46:00.003-06:00

Mississippi exit polls:

White voters: 72% for Clinton, 27% for Obama

Black voters: 9% for Clinton, 91% for Obama

This, sadly, is not inconsistent with all other states (I'm lookin' at you, Ohio), but it is more pronounced than any I've noticed.

(All my photos of the Jackson rally here.)

ADDENDUM:
Asked in exit polls whether Clinton is "honest and trustworthy," 52% of the voters said yes, 48% said no. Same question for Obama, 70% yes, 30% no. I wonder how many people said that Obama is honest and trustworthy, that Clinton isn't, and voted for her anyway.

Finally here

2008-03-10T18:10:00.001-06:00

Finally here
Originally uploaded by Robert Pollack

Very tricky.

2008-03-10T17:13:00.001-06:00

Very tricky.
Originally uploaded by Robert Pollack

I guess they wanted to fill the camera backdrop first, and not let the
audience know. They just put the podium up (it had been sitting off
the stage) and I'm behind it.

Still waiting for Barack

2008-03-10T16:51:00.001-06:00

Still waiting for Barack
Originally uploaded by Robert Pollack

Obama in Jackson

2008-03-10T15:55:00.000-06:00

They said doors were opening at 5:00, and Obama at 7:00; I got here at
3:00 and there were several thousands before me.

They opened the doors early, and it took maybe 45 minutes from when
the crowd started moving until I was in. Line splits into many lines,
then through metal detectors, dump your pockets for the nice men and
turn all cameras and phones ON, no bags. No signs either, and remove
all buttons.

The uniformed secret service man giving these instructions to my chunk
of the line ("Maryland" on his badge) was received very warmly by the
crowd. You secret service? Yes ma'am. You been to Mississippi before?
I've been to Biloxi once (or did he say Gulf Port?). Thank you for
what you doin. Thank you ma'am.

I got a decent seat by not being shy about asking whether seats were
being saved and squeezing in with strangers. I have my camera but
light isn't great. And there's wireless!

4:55. Two hours to sit. Auditorium is filling quick.

Waiting for Barack in Jackson, Miss.

2008-03-10T14:33:00.001-06:00

Waiting for Barack in Jackson, Miss.
Originally uploaded by Robert Pollack

"Hushed Worry"

2008-02-27T23:19:00.002-06:00

I am struck by the invocation of "hushed worry" in the New York Times, which I've heard before quite unhushed and expressed with more clarity than worry.

After arriving in Mississippi in 2005 I heard it expressed many times from many of my students (all of them black) that no black man could be elected president and that, if one somehow managed, he'd be shot dead in short order. I told them about Barack Obama, who at that time was unknown to them, and predicted that he wouldn't run in 2008 (to finish a term in the senate and to make way for Clinton), but to look out for him in 2012 or 2016 depending on a Clinton victory or defeat. I reassured them -- and, in hindsight, maybe myself more than them -- that times have changed, that the picture one gets of race relations as a black teenager in rural Mississippi is not typical of America, that Bush is loathed vehemently by huge numbers of people and has had his assassination more-or-less endorsed or called for or fantasized about by more-or-less mainstream figures, and that he marches on. I told the story of President Clinton's visit to a local school while I was a teenager, of the clear Secret Service presence that anticipated it, of the snipers on the rooftops, of the kid pulled out of my photography class by scary men to have the fear of God put in him the day after an off-the-cuff stupid joke reported by I don't know whom (the walls?) the week prior to the event.

I've heard that assertion less frequently and with perhaps less certainty in "urban" and somewhat more worldly Jackson, now that nobody needs me to tell them who Obama is. But I still hear it. Probably two-thirds of a class of twenty-five black teenagers last week seemed convinced that he'd be dead inside a year if he gets elected.

I went into the same speech I've given before, but when I'm alone reading the New York Times I know it's the lunatic and not the 51% of the country hating your guts that shows up armed to the rally, and there's an uneasy feeling in my gut, more anxious by far for my students and their psyches than for Obama or his family or the nation.

Two sentences, no context

2008-02-20T23:33:00.002-06:00

Maybe my sense of humor is strange, but I laughed out loud.

From a student essay:

Do they have a right to complain? Of course it is!

Support for Obama

2008-02-11T02:27:00.000-06:00

This is so good it almost seems staged -- but if it were staged it wouldn't be so well acted.

A guy with a camara -- judging by his questions and tone, he is presumably a conservative -- walks up to a young black guy at an Obama rally and starts asking tough questions. I won't speculate on what he expected, but the kid is totally disarming.

requiescat in pace

2008-01-30T02:35:00.000-06:00

I just heard (over facebook) that one of my students from my first year was killed in a car accident. He was seventeen.

The local paper up there has his picture on the front page, and two articles. I am surprised to learn from them that he had transferred this year to the private academy. The academy was founded when the white community fled the public school system upon its forced integration, and there may be some subtext in the articles (and some more explicit racial attention in the user comments below one of them).

The decision to transfer, says the article, "came after a lot of soul searching and praying about bettering the education" of Michael and his younger siblings. "He wanted to improve his grades and his chances of continuing his education at a higher level," and, "[e]veryone at North Delta welcomed him and his family with open arms."

The paper reports that he, "leaves a powerful legacy at the [academy]." According to the headmaster: “When my first child was born, my pastor shared an important lesson with me, telling me that God gives a parent children not just for what we can teach them, but mainly for what they can teach us [. . . . I]t is clear to me that Michael was sent to North Delta School because of the wonderful lessons he has taught us.”

Michael was surely a handful. I wrote him up and sent him out of my room many times, and had several conferences with one or the other of his parents. He was also exceptionally, unusually bright. I've had more than 400 students now (probably 500 if you count summer school) and he had without doubt one of the sharpest minds among them.

He died when his car hit a tree in the middle of the night on a road I often took in the middle of the night, on my way to or from friends deeper in the Delta, or blues shows in Clarksdale. It's one lane each way, and long and dark, and cotton fields and cotton fields, and hard to take slow. Michael sure did always get bored fast. I wish there could have been more for him in the world.

War & Peace

2007-11-11T23:44:00.001-06:00

Thinking about leadership and history and Mississippi, and trying to balance hopefulness and cynicism, and thumbing back through some Tolstoy; and goddamn why am I not reading more of these things these days?

---
Excerpt:

Toward the end of the year 1811, an intensified arming and concentration of the forces of western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces -- millions of men, reckoning those that transported and victualed the army -- moved from the west eastward to the Russian frontier, where in exactly the same way the Russian forces had been massing during that year. On the twelfth of June the forces of western Europe crossed the Russian border and war began, that is, an event took place counter to human reason and human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such an infinite number of crimes, frauds, treacheries, robberies, forgeries, issues of counterfeit money, depredations, incendiarisms, and murders, as are not recorded in the annals of all the courts of justice in the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as crimes.

What brought about this extraordinary event? What were its causes? The historians, with naive certainty, tell us that its causes were the wrongs inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the Continental system, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Aleksandr, the mistakes of diplomats, and so on.

Consequently it would only have been necessary for Napoleon, Rumyantsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and a reception, to have taken the pains to write a more adroit note, or for Napoleon to have written to Aleksandr: "Monsieur, mon frère, I consent to restore the Duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg," and there would have been no war.

We can understand these views being held at the time. We can understand how to Napoleon it seemed that the war was caused by England's intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St. Helena). We can understand that to the members of the English Parliament the cause of the war seemed to be Napoleon's love of power; that to the Duke of Oldenburg its cause seemed to be the violence done to him; that to the merchants the cause seemed to be the Continental system, which was ruining Europe; that to the generals and old soldiers it seemed that the chief cause was the necessity of giving them employment; that to the legitimists of the day it was the need for reestablishing les bons principes; and to the diplomats of that time it all seemed to result from the fact that the alliance between Russia and Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealed from Napoleon, and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178. It is natural that these and a countless, an infinite number of other reasons -- the number depending on the multiplicity of points of view -- presented themselves to the men of that day, but to us, to posterity contemplating the accomplished fact in all its magnitude, and seeking to penetrate its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seem insufficient. To us it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men killed and tortured one another either because Napoleon was ambitious, or Aleksandr firm, or because England's policy was astute, or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp the connection between these circumstances and the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why, because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe pillaged and slaughtered the inhabitants of Smolensk and Moscow and were slaughtered by them.

To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away by the process of research and can therefore regard the event with unclouded common sense, the causes that suggest themselves are legion. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we discover, and each single cause or series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself, and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the event and by its impotence (unless in conjunction with all the other concurring causes) to occasion the event. To us the willingness or unwillingness of this or that French corporal to serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon's refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the Duchy of Oldenburg, for had the corporal refused to serve, and had a second, a third, a thousand corporals and privates, also refused, Napoleon's army would have been so greatly reduced that the war could not have taken place.

If Napoleon had not taken offense at the demand that he withdraw beyond the Vistula, and had he not ordered his troops to advance, there would have been no war. But if all his sergeants had refused to serve a second term there also could have been no war. Nor could there have been a war had there been no English intrigues and no Duke of Oldenburg, and had Aleksandr not felt insulted, and had there not been an autocratic government in Russia, or a French Revolution and the ensuing dictatorship and Empire, or all the other things that produced the French Revolution, and so on. Without any one of these causes nothing could have happened. Accordingly all of them -- myriads of causes -- coincided to bring about what occurred. And so there was no single cause for the war, but it happened simply because it had to happen. Millions of men, renouncing human feelings and reason, had to move from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries earlier hordes of men had moved from east to west slaying their fellows.

The actions of Napoleon and Aleksandr, on whose words the event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by lot or conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Aleksandr (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was required, without any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands the real power lay -- the soldiers who fired the guns, transported provisions and cannons -- should consent to carry out the will of those weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes.

We inevitably resort to fatalism to explain the irrational phenomena of history (that is to say, phenomena the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to account for such phenomena rationally, the more irrational and incomprehensible do they become to us.

Every man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his own ends, and feels in his whole being that he can at any moment perform or abstain from performing this or that action, but as soon as he has performed it, that action executed at a given moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predetermined significance.

There are two sides to the life of every man: the personal life, which is free to the degree that its interests are abstract, and the elemental life of the swarm, in which he ineluctably follows the laws decreed for him.

Consciously man lives for himself, but unconsciously he serves as an instrument for the accomplishment of the historical, social ends of mankind. An act committed is irrevocable, and that action coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men acquires historical significance. The higher a man stands in the social scale, the more connections he has with people and the more power he has over them, the more manifest is the predetermination and inevitability of his every act.

"The hearts of kings are in the hand of God."

A king is the slave of history.

History, that is, the unconscious, common, swarm life of mankind uses every moment of the life of kings as an instrument for its own ends.

Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that it depended on him to shed or not to shed the blood of his people -- as Aleksandr expressed it in the last letter he wrote him -- he had never been so subject to inevitable laws, which compelled him (while thinking that he was acting of his own volition) to do for the world in general, for history, what had to be done.

The people of the west moved east to slay their fellow man. And by the law of coincidence, thousands of minute causes fitted together and combined to produce the movement and the war: reproaches for the nonobservance of the Continental system, the Duke of Oldenburg's wrongs, the movement of troops into Prussia -- undertaken (as it seemed to Napoleon) for the sole purpose of obtaining an armed peace -- the French Emperor's love of war and habit of waging it coinciding with the inclinations of his people, the passion for grandiose preparations, the expenditures on those preparations and the necessity of obtaining advantages to compensate for them, the intoxicating effect of the honors he received in Dresden, the diplomatic negotiations which in the opinion of contemporaries were carried on with a sincere desire to attain peace but which only wounded the self-esteem of both sides, and millions upon millions of other causes that adapted themselves to the fated event and coincided with it.

When an apple has ripened and falls -- why does it fall? Is it because of the force of gravity, because its stem withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it?

None of these is the cause. All this is only the conjunction of conditions in which every vital, organic, elemental event occurs. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decomposes, and so forth, is just as right and as wrong as the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to fall. In the same way the historian who says that Napoleon went to Moscow and was destroyed because Aleksandr desired his destruction is just as right and as wrong as the man who says that an undermined hill weighing thousands of tons fell because of the last blow of a workman's mattock. In historic events the so-called great men are but labels giving names to events, and like labels they have only the slightest connection with the event itself.

Every act of theirs that seems to them an act of their own free will is, in the historical sense, not free at all, but is connected with the whole course of history and determined from eternity.

-War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Ann Dunnigan, Book III, Part One, Chapter One

Dialect

2007-09-20T14:21:00.000-06:00

Maria Newman, writing about the Jena Six case for the New York Times, says:

Mr. Bell was to have been sentenced on today(emphasis mine - see earlier posts for a bit more on that usage)

I wonder where she's from.

Politics

2007-08-04T20:44:00.001-06:00

Politics
Originally uploaded by Robert Pollack

I had a big, glossy card from Stop Lawsuit Abuse in Mississippi, Inc. in my mailbox this morning, urging me to vote for incumbent Insurance Commissioner George Dale. I thought it was peculiar that the back of the card would have a photograph not only of Commissioner Dale, but of his opponent, Gary Anderson. And it occurred to me that the photo of Mr. Anderson, who is black, looked unusually dark. My scan may appear darker still, but it does seem unnaturally dark on the original.

On his campaign site I found what seems to be the same photo (high-resolution available here).

I found an .mp3 of Commissioner Dale on the radio, discussing his participation in the selection of a figure in the Democratic Party in Mississippi. His says that one of the things they were looking for is a white candidate. He says it awkwardly at first, like it might have slipped out, but then is very candid. Nothing against blacks, apparently. But the Democratic Party needs to win back the conservative whites in this state, he says, or it's got no future here. I guess that's how you do it.

WTF?

2007-05-15T02:28:00.000-06:00

Todd at tremble.com writes:
"I am quite serious when I say I would be totally happy if this video was the World Wide Web's grand finale, and then the Internet just went dark and we all went back to making candles and reading the bible and stuff."

And it's not an isolated moment:

A fitting response, in the guise of a blogging how-to:

Take that, Internet.

My MTC Experience . . .

2007-05-11T12:09:00.000-06:00

I remember reading that the University of Mississippi had banned sticks in its stadium, in an effort to reduce the number of Confederate flags at games without overtly violating first amendment freedoms. There was quite a hullabaloo apparently. I laughed about it, I think. I doubt I would have been confident to say that no such place existed, that no such controversy would erupt, that nobody cared about or took seriously that sort of thing, but I was surprised by it anyway. It seemed so strange and quaint. So archaic. I probably reflected on it for a few seconds, but if I had a thousand years I don't think it would have occurred to me that I might one day live and work in that state, attend courses at and be awarded a degree from that very school.

But here I am. The way I got here is recorded in the early posts to this blog; a lot of what has happened since is chronicled in the posts between then and now. After college I wanted to take a few years to experience a place I didn't know, to try being helpful during my time there. So I applied to the Peace Corps, and almost went, but decided in the end that I could accomplish the same things in my own country. I had some vague notion of a teaching program in Mississippi where a lot of graduates from my college have gone, and a friend who had recently entered the program filled me in with the details, so I rescinded my Peace Corps application and applied instead to the Mississippi Teacher Corps.

A short time later I was in Oxford, which became (and remains) a town that fascinates me. Two months and I was in Sardis, Mississippi -- a two stop-sign and no stop-light town -- where I would have easily the worst and hardest year of my life. Then to Oxford again, and then a year in Jackson, the tiny and hollow urban center of an overwhelmingly rural state. And then they give me a degree and I'm free to go. (I'll be staying another year in Jackson first, though.)

That, in a paragraph of fewer than a hundred words, is my Mississippi Teacher Corps Experience, and I hardly know how to begin unpacking it.

I wrote in my portfolio (the culminating project of the coursework for the M.A. degree) that, "I wasn't a teacher when I arrived and I am one now." That change was often hard and I'm still not sure that I always like it. Last year I often hated the person I had to be to get anything done at school, to maintain any sort of order, to function as (I hope) a beneficent part of a system that I believed (and now believe still more firmly) to be corrupted and corrupting. I can justify my role with a belief that even this corrupted system is the only way out of something for a lot of people who badly need out of it, that it can sometimes offer a badly tarnished glimpse -- but a glimpse! -- of what is beautiful and true, but sometimes it takes a hard willfulness to continue making this justification to myself. This year I've adjusted some, and I've found my bearings, and I'm usually happier with who I am in my teacher clothes. But I'm not always sure it's good for me, and I'm not sure I haven't just become complacent about some things. That can be a disheartening thought.

Still, I am deeply grateful for this experience. One of my central aims in coming here was to get to know my country better, and that I have certainly done. I don't pretend to know it thoroughly or with any extraordinary insight, but I know it better now than I did two years ago, and see better both its beauty and it ugliness. Mississippi is a sad and a beautiful place, and I have come to love it. I can't stay here, but I wouldn't trade it.

I am thankful also to the Mississippi Teacher Corps for introducing me to my classmates, so many of whom have been so instructive to me, and so many of whom I now count as close friends. The frustration and struggle and conversation we've shared have been as formative to me as anything has. It feels rare and somehow magical to find a community of such people. Whenever I leave from one I brood over the likelihood of ever finding another.

I can't better describe my "MTC experience" than I did in my portfolio: These two years have taught me beyond all measure. I have become a vastly more competent and useful teacher, in just about every sense that clause can be understood, and I have become a different and better human being.

Quitting

2007-05-04T13:22:00.000-06:00

Quitting can be a heated issue in the Mississippi Teacher Corps. My class lost three people (out of twenty something), all of whom finished the year teaching. This year's class has lost several more than that, several have left the state and their schools in the middle of the term, and there is some bitterness about it. People leave after finishing the year, and there's some shit-talking unfortunately, but there is usually at least an acknowledgment that they had the fortitude to finish the year. Leaving mid-year strands a district without a teacher -- especially frustrating when the abandoned classes include those that, like many that MTC teachers teach, will take a pass-or-don't-graduate exam at the end of the year -- and the MTC thus asks those who leave (or is there more teeth to it than this?) to refund the expenses it has already paid toward their training and coursework.

I thought about quitting a lot. Most of us do, I think, though some of us more seriously and some of us less. I thought about it seriously and often. It was hard as hell. It was the most excruciating year of my life, and I wanted it to end. I was miserable at work, and I felt like an exile, alone in the community where I lived, treated usually with degrees of hospitality but at a tangible distance from the two communities (white and black) that I lived between. I would not have finished the first semester if not for the biweekly Friday nights in Oxford, staying at the Day's Inn talking and joking over drinks with other MTC teachers, with my people -- young and vaguely hip literate liberal artsies -- or the weekly (or more) trips to my nearest MTC and TFA friends, forty-five minutes away. In the second semester I seriously considered not returning for a second year. I swore not to return to the same district, to move -- if I stayed in Mississippi -- somewhere with a better administration and more of my peers.

I'm not sure why I decided to stay. I think it was a lot of things. I wanted a chance to keep at this and start fresh. I wanted to get to know better some of the wonderful people in this program with me. I wanted to get to know Mississippi better, which is a fascinating and beautiful state, and I hadn't had enough time to see it, I thought, in my awful first year. I had heard repeatedly that the second year is a lot easier. I had gone through a big break-up. I had put off deciding long enough that my options for what to do next would have been limited, and I didn't know exactly where I'd go. I was reluctant to quit when I had started something and gone half way. I'm glad that I stayed. The second year is not easy, and I'm not always happy about going to school in the morning, but it is indescribably improved (as a result of both experience and a better environment, I think).

I wish that quitting weren't so stigmatized in the MTC. Sometimes we all congratulate ourselves for persevering in such a difficult endeavor, but there's sometimes also such ugliness toward those who leave. There is an ugly and patronizing and infuriating suggestion -- which I've heard from every level of power in the MTC and even from the state superintendent of education -- that if you teachers just do x, y, and z, then. . . as if those of us who follow their every advice and suggestion to the furthest extent that our mortal endurance allows will somehow not have immensely challenging first years. Some of the people who suggest these things have taught in these classrooms, but clearly not recently enough if they can say such patently offensive nonsense.

I'm pleased whenever a caring and competent adult decides to occupy these classrooms with these students. It's sad when they leave, and they risk leaving their students as they may have been before -- with no caring or competent adult -- whether they do so after two years or two weeks. But this job is hard as hell, especially when you've never done it before, and this will be so no matter how conscientiously you weigh every move and follow every good suggestion. Nobody should feel bad for thinking about leaving. That's normal. I encourage them to keep on if they have the strength. If they don't, and continuing isn't worth it to them, it's sad but I can't really blame them. I'm sometimes amazed that more don't go.

Homework and Motivation

2007-05-04T13:02:00.000-06:00

Some time ago, while I was neglecting this blog, we were asked to write a bit either about ways to motivate students or to get students to turn in homework. Maybe they're the same question, though. A fair and common way to solve the homework problem is not to assign it. Students who have parental pressures (like a lot of I.B. students, I find) are fairly good at working at home; most others won't do it, and I doubt they can be compelled. Some teachers say that allowing students to start work in class and finish it at home increases the odds of getting it back, and I've done that many times. It's either a way of somewhat increasing the odds of getting homework back, or of drastically decreasing the odds of getting classwork back.

So I don't usually give homework. When I do, I try to make it a fairly simple task that is connected to what did or what will happen in class, like coming up with a topic for an essay to be written in class, or thinking of a word or a sentence that is an example of something discussed in class, or something else along these lines.

Motivating them in the most shallow sense is often as simple as getting their parents onto them, but more meaningfully has to be getting them to give a damn about what you're doing, and that's a lot harder. "Connecting it" to "real-world" concerns is overrated and minimally effective, I think. It may convince somebody to pursue drudgery as a solemn duty, but it will remain drudgery. Really motivating them requires convincing them that the thing is worthwhile for its own sake, that it's beautiful. Being excited by it yourself helps a lot, especially with the ones who are still open to kind and responsible adults; with the others, I don't know. I don't think there's any trick.

Aggressions and Resentments

2007-04-11T18:43:00.000-06:00

I usually don't give money to beggars. There were lots of them around where I grew up, and when I was small I sometimes saw my father turn down their requests for money with an offer to buy them food. I never saw one accept the offering. Once, when I was a teenager, someone asked me for spare change as I was walking into a Taco Bell, and I gave him none, but I walked out with some food for him a few moments later. He looked at me disgustedly and continued collecting soda cans from a dumpster.

Today I left school on my way to a doctor's appointment for which I had to fast. It was hot and muggy and I had the windows down. I haven't seen many beggars in Mississippi but when I stopped at a light in downtown Jackson, hungry and tired, a guy on the curb started to shout his begging at the windows of each of the stopped cars in turn. When he got to mine and I didn't immediately respond, he belligerently shouted, "White boy ain't help no nigger," and waved me away angrily. I told him I might help if he weren't such an asshole. Maybe that was rash.

One More Try

2007-04-03T13:54:00.000-06:00

So it's been a while. The summer passed quickly, blogger ate some of my posts (which I later recovered and reposted), I stopped posting while I investigated moving to another host, I never really did, and now I've accumulated quite a pile of skipped blog-assignments. I'll give it another try.

I left Sardis, as I discussed earlier. Since I'm not Up On Choctaw Ridge anymore, the blog needs a new name. I'm in Jackson now.

More to come soon.

Biggest Success as a Teacher

2006-10-24T17:13:00.000-06:00

Today I heard a student yelling at another down the hallway: Shutup or I'll unseam ya from nave to chops!

Macbeth. Act I, Scene 2.

Backlog, III

2006-10-05T22:27:00.000-06:00

Failure Story

The last year (like every year, I suppose) has been full of failures. It has had its successes, too, of course, and even the failures may themselves reveal or allow new and different successes, so this is no miserable admission. Still, as a new teacher in a deeply troubled school district, faced with chaos and with essentially no administrative support, reality demanded constant adjustment of methods and goals, and it presented frequent disappointments.

Maybe the greatest and most obvious failure is evident in the look of the next year: I am not returning to the same school district. I don’t know if that fact alone represents a failure, or if it is rather the result of some failure or of some collection of them; in any case, it has been for me a cause of both sorrow and relief, and however I explain or justify my leaving, it stinks of disappointment.

Enumerating reasons for my decision to leave that district is not a satisfying task. All teachers have hard jobs, and the Mississippi Teacher Corps places teachers where they will have extraordinarily hard jobs. What can I describe that I hadn’t heard about before I came, that I didn’t expect? We all join the Teacher Corps anticipating difficulties, maybe even (somewhat perversely) hoping for them, as we expect them to present novel experiences and formative challenges, even opportunities to do good. What can I describe that I haven’t heard about from other teachers in this program, other teachers who are staying and have stayed in their districts and lived with the difficulties? Is that the failure? Am I complaining too much, and being weaker than so many of my peers?

The principal quit a week before school began. The superintendent didn’t last much longer, getting suspended and then dismissed under suspicious circumstances. The new principal, hired at the last minute, was the most constantly and universally hostile person I have ever known. She battled with the best teachers, compelled some fine students (with some of the school’s most sophisticated parents) to leave for other districts, and screamed constantly at everyone, at students, at teachers. The most problematic students would keep returning to my room, while the ones who had never been in trouble for anything would be suspended for chewing gum. Of course bells rang erratically and I had no access to a copier, making classes last unpredictably 45 or 75 minutes and requiring me to administer tests on an overhead projector or dry-erase board. But I think I could have dealt with these things. I don’t think these things would have made me leave. But the screaming! The constant, terrible hostility! On days when she was off-campus, the lightness was palpable. Everyone was happier.

Should I have stayed? It was widely believed (correctly, it turns out) that she wouldn’t be returning as principal (being promoted to the central office). It might have gotten better. Over the summer I saw students in town, chatted with them on the street or in the grocery store. I sometimes felt in those moments that I should have stayed, and that leaving was failure. I am going to another school that serves many poor students, but it has a significantly more competent administration, an administration that is not hostile; and I am going where I have friends (I was alone in the previous community, and very lonely). I felt like my presence, my mere presence, may have been beneficial to many of my students, and I feel bad to leave them. I felt like most of whatever benefit they took from me was despite their being in school and not because of it. I wish I could have had more failures with them, and through failures maybe some greater degree of success, but I felt thwarted by the circumstances. I hated getting up to go back every morning.

I am trying to keep in contact with some of my students, and I am going where there are similar students but better circumstances. My whole experience in that school is stained by failure, but I expect such failure to inform new and better success.

Success Story

I expect that a year of teaching will always contain many little success (and many little failures), so long as one allows oneself to notice them. Allowing oneself to notice them isn’t always so easy to do, especially when they seem dimmed by the magnitude of their corresponding failures, but they’re there for noticing when the mood improves.

Most successes, or at least the most noticeable ones, or the ones we’re most inclined to care at all about, involve individual students. That’s probably as much a function of what we care about as it is of where our successes lie. Nobody, so far as I know, wants to teach in order to improve test scores, and such successes are only valuable to most of us since they represent collections of little successes, each one with an individual student.

It’s hard to pick one of those little successes to elevate above the others. I had students who aggravated me from moments after meeting them, but whom I came to love. I had students who brought discipline problems into my classroom, but who brought them less and less as the year went on – some of them eventually bringing none at all. There are the students who email me now, and who tell me they’re sad I left their school. (Most of them never brought any significant problems to my room, and were just pleased to be around a competent adult who was eager to push them.)

“J.” sticks out in my mind. He wasn’t especially poorly behaved, but not especially well behaved either. He was in my most tiring class, with a lot of kids who were or who thought they were too old or too uninterested or too tough to give much of a damn about anything in school, least of all grammar and literature, and there a lot of problems resulted. J. would get drawn into them sometimes. He would talk a lot, and say sarcastic things. I thought he had a sense of superiority, and it gave him a difficult attitude sometimes, but his sense wasn’t wholly inaccurate. He was exceptionally smart, would see things and understand things that were beyond his classmates. I suppose very smart people constantly faced with foolishness, arbitrariness, and incompetence may tend toward senses of superiority, and distance.

He normally did not need to be disciplined, especially compared to many of his classmates, but when he did he reacted harshly to it. He would talk when he shouldn’t, he would break other rules, and he would be bitterly angry when I said anything about it. Many times I talked to him in the hall, or got him to stay after school, and made clear to him that I recognized his intelligence and respected it. He didn’t really read much, which was ordinary, but I learned that he was unashamed to admit publicly when he did, and even that he sometimes liked it. This was not so ordinary. I sometimes tried to push books on him, things that I liked when I was in high school, and he never cared to take them; but he didn’t suggest that the idea was absurd, and even seemed to appreciate the offers.

In the last week of school, when finals were done and grades were in and the students knew it, and when, therefore, hardly any of them showed up, J. was in my room almost every period, almost every day. What few kids were around wandered the halls freely, and looked for teachers who would let them play cards or hook up video games in their rooms (I wouldn’t). J. spent a lot of that week in my room, with a few others who wandered in and out. I taught them sudoku, and we watched movies that I thought were worth their time. (Several kids showed up for The Chronicles of Narnia and word-of-mouth spread quickly about Whalerider; only J. sat through Casablanca.) We talked about the news, and the school, and about the town and county. We talked a little about languages and about mathematics. I thought that week was extraordinary, and that the teaching I did then was some of the most valuable that I could do. The week was successful, and though I don’t expect ever to hear from him again, it showed me how successful I’d been with J.

Backlog, II

2006-10-05T21:52:00.000-06:00

Reflecting on the summer school experience

I should probably tell any stray reader who doesn't know: participants in the Mississippi Teacher Corps (like me, for instance) are enrolled in coursework to earn a master's degree, and as a part of that coursework, during this, the second summer, we teach at a summer school. Now, last year the second-years did not teach at a summer school, and just in the last few months the requirement was added – other courses pushed back and making a heavier load later – to great surprise and dramatic effect. My reaction to the new requirement fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum formed by my colleagues: I was neither eager nor outraged. I did feel the touch of injustice: we accepted the terms of a course of work and the terms were changed after they had been accepted. It seemed to me to be bad form for the Teacher Corps, dubiously ethical, and to the extent that we had entered into a contract, I wondered if it were even legal. (Though, as I have learned in Mississippi, everything's legal if nobody cares enough to pursue it.)

I hadn't looked very closely at the fine print, though. I had no idea, upon entering, what the requirements for the degree even were. I came here to see the rural South, to have adventures, to get to know my country better. To collect stories to bore my grandchildren with. Those of my colleagues who had cared enough to scrutinize the requirements before arriving had a better position from which to moan, it seemed to me. And it was clear that the intentions were pure: our "in the field" training was abysmal last summer, and this would be an extraordinary opportunity for the next group of first years and for the future of the program. Some group has to get the short end of both sticks (no benefit from superior training itself, but burden of helping in training for the next group). And where somebody must suffer, it may as well be us as anybody.

So I went into it feeling about like that. And I guess I still do feel about like that, if maybe seeing the glass somewhat more half-full rather than merely appreciating both its half-emptiness and half-fullness at once, which is more my habit. I have enjoyed the month, more or less. It was a hell of a lot easier than the year had been, and the first-years did most of the work. I can see how much better off they are than I was (so much!), and I know how much more enjoyable this was than the classes at Ole Miss we'd probably have had in their stead. Of course, we'll still have most of those classes, and I hope they'll be better than some of those we've had before; but I'm not too worked up about their being postponed. Holly Springs Summer School '06, despite some failures (notably a lack of administrative presence and a scheduling failure that resulted in 20 daily minutes of please-figure-something-out-teachers-because-somebody-screwed-up time), has been a positive experience.

What was your biggest challenge this year?

My biggest challenge this year, or maybe it was a constellation of challenges, was that of my administration. I was faced at times with understandable failures, at times with failures that were difficult to understand, at times with failures that appeared to result from incompetence. We had lunatic policies like twenty minutes of silent sustained reading – a great idea on its own! – that were to be the last twenty minutes of 7th period. Actually, they ended five minutes before 7th period ended, so it took up 25 of 7th period's 55 minutes every day, so that students had for only 30 minutes whatever 55 minute class they happened to have at the end of the day. It would have been great if we had merely shaved a few minutes from each period, but that would require a bell schedule that rang at odd times, and our bell rang when a secretary pushed the button (at VERY odd times), so such was an impossible solution. Getting rid of half of one period arbitrarily was better, apparently.

And that bell! The bell to end 5th period rang ten or fifteen minutes late almost every day, which made for one unusually long period and one unusually short one. At my regular prodding, the principal insisted from the start of the year that a new, automated bell system was a priority, that it would come in weeks or months. Of course it never did. And since it rang at the caprice of the secretaries, nobody even knew whether classes started at the hour and ended five minutes before the next hour, or ended at the hour and started five minutes after. So when we were to take our classes to the auditorium at, say, one o'clock, are we supposed to take our class that ENDS at one o'clock give-or-take five minutes, or the class that BEGINS at one o'clock give-or-take five minutes? Nobody knew, and there was chaos, and a decent principal could have fixed it for all future assemblies with one quick decision, but that decision was never made. So it was always chaos. And chaos was met with anger and hostility.

The hostility! The constant, grating hostility! The weekly faculty meetings that took the life out of me, that were sitting down and being yelled at for half an hour!

And we didn't get regular access to a copy machine until March. I taught a state-tested subject (with no support – I was placed in a classroom with students and told to raise test scores), and again and again I would find materials and resources for test preparation and again and again I would find them useless without access to a copier. Almost all of my tests were on overheads or written on the board. When the test was weeks away, and we were asked what help we needed to prepare for the tests, told that the administration would get us whatever we needed, we asked for a substitute teacher for a week so that we could have two members of the English department working with the test-takers in smaller groups. We were promised it. We never got it.

I never actually saw a substitute teacher in the building. If a teacher was out, his students sat in the library or another teacher's room. All we could do was try not to be out.

In many ways that characterized my experience. Just be there. Sometimes all I can do, the best I can do, the best I'm allowed to do, is to be there.

Describe an assignment, unit, or lesson that was particularly effective.

(I'm going to bend this assignment a little, and contrast several "units" that varied in their degrees of success. I hope it serves the purpose of the assignment – the spirit if not the letter – by providing an opportunity to reflect on the diverse factors that make such a thing effective or not.)

I had resolved before the school year began that all of my students would read, or would attempt to read, quite a lot; and when I learned that I would have an honors class, I became especially determined to get them reading much and often. The selection I found when I got there, however, was somewhat disappointing. I wrote before (elsewhere in this blog) about the Ellison. I wanted to strike a balance between seriousness of literature and immediacy of student interest. I'm not inclined to load up on 20th century African American literature, since the literary tradition that my students have inherited (if only they knew!) is so enormous and so rich, and I'm afraid of limiting it. But, on the other hand, I didn't expect it to be easy to convince them to own Homer or Shakespeare. Both are theirs to own, every bit as rightfully as Langston Hughes or Maya Angelou, but they might not be as immediately sympathetic. So for our first book I wanted to acquaint my honors class with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: one of the most important novels about the 20th century African American experience, and deeply referential, richly complex, difficult and beautiful. Thankfully our book cabinet (which we have instead of a book room, as I think I wrote in a previous post), though it doesn't have much, did have a bunch of copies. Not enough, of course, but when I combined that resource with those of every public library in Panola County, and drove to Oxford for one more copy (every publicly available copy in the county, plus one!), we had enough for the class.

So we read the Ellison. All told, it went well. A lot of the kids were engaged; a few loved it. Of course a few couldn't be compelled to read the damn thing. A lot read it and were confused. I tried to make up for it with classroom conversations, and had some mixed success.

After that our selections were mostly determined by the contents of the book cabinet. We read Death of a Salesman, and the places they went with it! So much further than with the Ellison! I don't know how the cultural monolithists would explain that, but despite the "white" suburban angst, it was easy to read and juicy – sex and anger and suicide – and our experience with it was more successful overall than was our experience with Ellison.

The most successful of all, though, was our unit on Elie Wiesel's Night – presumably further still from the cultural experience of my students. But, again, it wasn't too hard to read, we could do a lot of the work together in class, the Holocaust is shocking and horrible, the depiction graphic, and the connections – to injustice, brutality, fear, intimidation, slavery and servitude, ownership of oneself and one's own fate – were very readily made. It might have helped that, just as we selected Night for our class, Oprah selected it for her book club. I may have benefited from her credibility with some of my honors girls.

Backlog

2006-10-05T21:11:00.000-06:00

[What follows are posts I was told to write for classes at Ole Miss and which I emailed to somebody but never posted.]

Five pieces of advice for the incoming first-years:

1- The best piece of advice that I received is perhaps also the hardest to follow: don't take work home. Teaching already takes a lot of you, and it'll take all of you if you let it. If you have to stay at school until 9pm, stay at school until 9pm. Don't give in to the temptation to throw that work in a bag and take it with you, because then your home becomes an extension of work, and you lose something sacred. Having said it, I now add that I ignored this advice and took work home all the time. It made me miserable, and I resolve not to do it next year [note: already failed]. It's hard to avoid sometimes, because it seems so much worse to stay at work to do that work, but that's why they call that place work, and it's better for your soul. Two minutes of peace in your home at night is better than defiling the sanctuary.

2- The second best piece of advice that I received is related to the first, but easier to follow: Change your clothes the minute you get home. Maybe be undoing the top button as you walk in your front door. If that's really inconvenient, at least get down to an undershirt or something. However you're inclined to do it, ritualize the return to your sanctuary. Home is a sacred idea, and it deserves physical manifestations of sanctity. Chants and incense might be overdoing it, but change your clothes. And don't bring work there.

3- There is of course the perpetual and unfollowable: be more organized. If you're the most organized person you know, you're almost organized enough. Teachers have to keep track of so much worthless garbage, you may drown in it if you let yourself fall too far behind. I was always behind, and resolved at the end of each 9-week grading period to do better, and yet remained nearly drowning nearly all the time. Don't grade everything if you don't really have to, if you do have to grade it then grade it quick, and keep meticulous records of everything (note: throwing things into piles or files is not meticulous). And while lots of teachers will warn you about not throwing things out, you can probably throw out an awful lot more than you will. Lord knows the office does.

4- Think about grading while you write materials. Do not make a test without thinking at every step, how hard will this be to grade? What can I do to make this easier to grade?

5- For the gentlemen: loosen your tie. Ladies: get more comfortable shoes.

How did you feel about corporal punishment when you came here, and how do you feel about it now?

I hadn't given much thought to corporal punishment before I came to Mississippi. Like a lot of us in the Mississippi Teacher Corps, I don't think I was aware that corporal punishment was still practiced in public schools anywhere in America (or, probably, in the civilized world). I was surprised to learn about it, but not aghast. Of course I am aware that parents spank their kids, even progressive liberal parents, and that corporal punishment has been used just about everywhere just about forever. It's never been so distant to become for me an archaic relic of less enlightened times. It only seemed strange that it was used in public schools, since public institutions have been for me sterile and bureaucratic, subject to endless regulation. Touching children at all, not even to mention hitting them, seemed to break the formality that separates everyone in such institutions. Violence, or at least punitive violence, seems like a kind of paternal intimacy. Police and judges and schoolteachers administer the cold effects of justice: fines and forms, procedures and policies, incomprehensible jargon. They are not allowed the warmth of violence, of anything physical.

(I'm not sure I want schools to follow this model. For better and for worse, such schools create barriers between teachers and students. For a student to see a teacher in a grocery store comes as a shock: the teacher is a human being who eats and has physical needs!)

When I arrived, I was skeptical of corporal punishment, but not disturbed by it. I did not think it warranted the tone of moral outrage some in the Teacher Corps allowed it. I did not think it responsible to compare the crusader against corporal punishment to the civil rights activist. Maybe the crusader is right, but in such a comparison his issue is dwarfed and his ego, too often, inflated. Now, at the end of a year teaching in Mississippi, I am much more deeply opposed to corporal punishment; and while I remain put-off by some of the rhetoric of those who oppose it, I have come to see it as a much more sinister presence in the raising of children.

Putting aside arguments of its effectiveness or ineffectiveness as an instrument of discipline, corporal punishment associates authority and violence. To some extent this is a natural association. For most of us the threat of violence becomes very abstracted in our understanding of social consequences; but it may always remain, in whatever form. Why follow burdensome laws if not for the distaste of the consequences, which are at least abstracted "violence" done to our financial or social standing, or to our ability to continue living the lives we live?

But for my students this association is not nearly so vague. Whenever I deferred to a school policy on anything at all, students would say, "You must be scared of the principal." This was a generic response, as common as, "Ah!" Surely I heard it dozens of times. I would respond, "No, but I respect the rules." This was senseless to them. Respect and fear are not distant and abstracted cousins, but two principles so similar as to become often indistinguishable. I obey rules insofar as I fear whatever authority enforces them, and not otherwise.

My students hit each other constantly. They play by hitting, like men or dogs who must seek or establish a place in the social order by competitions of aggression and submission. And how likely is it, I wonder, that the psychology reinforced by such a culture will find an expression in more serious violence against one another, or against women and children?

Inheritance

2006-05-27T18:36:00.000-06:00

These are two notes that were written by parents on progress reports. One was the progress report of a bright student with a terrible attitude and frequent unwillingness to do work, and the other of a bright student who is courteous and respectful. See if you can guess which student goes with which parent's note.

Cultural Deprivation

2006-05-27T18:31:00.000-06:00

It occurred to me Friday, the last day of school, that probably not even one student at North Panola High School sang, listened to, or thought of Alice Cooper.

I Swear I Didn't Write It

2006-05-17T17:48:00.000-06:00

I Swear I Didn't Write It
From Robert Pollack at flickr.com.

Graffiti discovered on our classroom set.

(I've taken some more pictures as the year ends.)

Driving home late from Quitman County

2006-05-02T22:50:00.000-06:00

A glow splattered green iridescent on my windshield, and glowed for seconds still. (We don't have that where I'm from.) It was beautiful.

Open letter to the Superintendent of Schools

2006-04-30T20:26:00.000-06:00

What follows is a letter written by a man to the superintendent of his local school district, explaining why he would not be enrolling his young daughter in school. (The man is not the same Robert Alter who teaches at Berkeley and has published several popular translations of books from the Hebrew Bible, but, rather [I think], a Robert M. Alter who has written what appear to be self-help books.) I first discovered this letter when I was in high school, and it meant enough to me that I kept it. I must have been fifteen or sixteen years old. I recently rediscovered it, and find that I now have, obviously, a different perspective on it, though perhaps not utterly different.

Dear Superintendent Grimmel:

I have received your letter asking why my daughter Greta is not attending your school system. I want to try and answer that.

I would like to avoid conflict between us by saying that Greta will be attending a private or alternative school, but the truth is that she will not be attending any school. I would also like to be able to say that my wife Jane and I are not aware that Greta must attend school by law. But we are. We are also aware that the State has penalties in such cases. But we don't care.

I assure you that what we are doing we are not doing lightly. We don't break laws lightly. Where the touch of the State is soft on the shoulder of our family, we do not shrink. We pay our taxes, we get shots for our dog, we register our car and drive it slowly. We don't disturb anyone's peace, and we don't litter. We are good neighbors and good people.

But at this touch - where compulsory education touches the life of our daughter - you must excuse us if we tell you to lay off. This law we choose to break.

In a word, no.

This is our beloved daughter, whose body and soul were given by God into our keeping, and you cannot have her.

This is the heart of the matter. Let me try to explain.

Greta is more ours than yours certainly, but she is really God's. Jane and I are her mother and father because God needed a woman and a man to lie down together and prepare a place for a human soul that was ready to incarnate on earth. God wanted Jane and me to take care of that soul - to nurture and protect it - until the time it is ready to go out on its own and do the tasks God has appointed for it. Our responsibility, as we see it, is to protect that soul from all harm so that it may grow according to its own laws. Sometimes I think of myself as a temple guard, standing before the sanctuary of the Lord, making sure that the unholy do not enter.

Does this seem silly and overblown to you? It does to me too, a little. I mean, all I want to do is answer the question, "Why aren't we sending Greta to kindergarten?" The problem is that every time I think I have answered it, I say to myself, "No, that's not it, there's something under that," and then I go to that deeper level, and there's a level under that, and so on until at the bottom of it all is God. I have a responsibility to God to protect this being that He has sent me. That is the heart of the matter.

I don't know you as a man, Superintendent Grimmel. All I know is that you share the values that inform the compulsory public education system in the country. You, your principals, and your teachers share those values. Some more, some less, but you've all got your fingers in that pie.

Frankly, I don't trust a one of you with my daughter's spirit. This is my beloved daughter, in whom I am so well pleased that I sometimes cry just thinking about her, and I will not hand her over to you.

Let me introduce my daughter. Greta is five, fair, blond, blue-eyed, and quite beautiful.

From birth she has "toed-in", especially her left foot, so she has to wear orthopedic shoes. We do special exercises every night.

One evening when she was two, lying in bed waiting for her story, Greta started singing the words, "My tushy feel good, my vagina feel good." The tune was quite pleasant, and she sang it for about ten minutes, the same words, the same tune, over and over. Then, with one last "My tushy feel good, my vagina feel good," rising to a kind of crescendo of pure well-being, she looked up at me and said, "Know that song?"

When she was 18 months old, she fell while carrying a glass of juice and slit her right wrist down to the nerve. She lost feeling and control in her hand and had to be operated on by a team of surgeons with fancy equipment. She was in the operating and recovery rooms, on her back with masked strangers doing strange and hurtful things to her, for eight hours. The operation was successful though. The nerve has regenerated completely, and except for her index finger sometimes wiggling about aimlessly, her hand is perfect. There is a scar that looks like a wishbone on her wrist. There are scars inside too. To this day, she distrusts many strangers, especially men, and she doesn't like to be separated from us, and she is frightened of people wearing masks.

She loves to swing on swings, and play with other kids, and carry small objects around all day, and tell time, and open car doors, and eat, and talk. She dearly loves to talk. I have never met anyone who talks more than Greta.

When she was three, she fought for and won the right to choose her own clothes. Sometimes she comes down the stairs looking like a pile of laundry.

She has an incredible memory. Sometimes she'll say to me, "Hey Papa, remember the time when..." and then she'll narrate an incident that happened so long ago and with such minute detail that I, who have forgotten it entirely, just listen in amazement.

She is very smart. I'm smart too, and I know the expectations people lay on you when you're smart, and I am frightened by how smart Greta is.

She laughs hysterically when tickled. Cries unmercifully when hurt or mad. Sometimes, if she doesn't get her way, or if she's lonely or just bored, she whines and whines until I go crazy and tell her I can't stand it anymore, and then she either stops and gets it together or bursts into tears.

She loves all beings littler than herself. Babies, chipmunks, birds, insects. Her favorite stories are the ones I tell her about Thumbelina, who lives in a hole under a tree near our cabin. One morning, when I was in a rage at our cat and hitting him because he had peed on the floor, I looked over at Greta and saw a look of such intense personal hurt and disappointment in me that I stopped and went over and held her.

She has a basically bipolar view of the universe. To her way of thinking, a thing is either Yuk or Yum. One does not have to probe very deeply to find out her opinion of something. "Hey, Greta, wanna help me clear the table?" "Yuk."

She writes songs, flowing spontaneous songs that she sings all day. Her latest one is called "Flowers":

Flowers at breakfast time
Flowers at lunch time
Flowers at dinner time
Flowers flowers flowers
Boom boom boom
Flowers Flowers Flowers
Boom boom boom
Flowers in the spring
Flowers in the summer
Flowers in the sun of the east.

When Greta feels insecure, she likes to stick her thumb in her mouth or her fingers in her vagina. Once she's plugged in, she feels better.

She is not conscious of being naked. I have seen other little children titter at her when she was naked, and she just looks back, mystified. How long she can stay in her prelapsarian innocence I don't know; I know that she will eventually fall and join the rest of us, but it hasn't happened yet.

Once in a while, she pees in her pants. Sometimes it's because she's laughing very hard, sometimes she's just playing so hard that she forgets it, and sometimes she's mad at someone and it's a revenge. Once when she was mad at me, her revenge was to go upstairs and break all my toothpicks.

She doesn't close the bathroom door when on the toilet. She isn't yet ashamed to be seen doing what human beings do. As a matter of fact, not only is she not private about defecating, she's quite social, and often invites passer-by in for a chat.

She has seen me and Jane and other grown-ups display some pretty intense emotions. She has seen us cry and scream. She has seen us angry and frightened. She looks on, curious, a bit awed, but she seems to accept it all as part of being human.

She's always picking fights with me these days. I tell her to go wash her face, and she tells me she doesn't have to. "You're not my boss!" I tell her it's time for bed, and she says it isn't. I tell her it's cold outside and she should wear a sweater, and she tells me it's not cold and she can wear whatever she wants to. I think she's separating her ego from ours and feeling her power, which is great, but it drives me nuts and I often feel like strangling her.

She gets so mad at me sometimes! She screams and hits me. She calls me a dummy. Her electric little rage. One part of me hates it. Another part is just so damn proud of her that all I can do while I'm getting punched is watch in admiration.

So, what will you teach this creature in your schools, Superintendent?

Will you teach her that every single part of her body, from her eye to her anus, is holy? Will you teach her that she - she herself, inside out - is from God and therefore perfect? Will you teach her to love herself? Will you teach her that whatever feeling she is feeling at any given moment is valid and okay? Will you teach her that she is better than no one and no one is better than her? Will you teach her not to judge anyone or argue with anyone? Will you teach her that television is empty, that newspapers and movies and stores and cars and cosmetics and clothes are narcotics, that money is guilt, that the American middle-class is desperate, that disease of the body is disease of the spirit, that 90 percent of the food in supermarkets is poison, that capitalism sucks? Will you teach her about suffering beautiful humanity? Will you teach her to every moment choose life? And what I mostly want to know, Superintendent, will you teach my daughter that she is God?

I know you won't. I didn't go through twenty years of schooling for nothing. I know what goes on in those classrooms. Christ, I'm a teacher! I get them at the end of the line in college. I see what's been done to those kids. I see their hot, angry pimples. I see them slump and cower in their chairs. I see their boredom and their laziness, which I know is really rage. I see the horrible thing in their eyes, the overwhelming question they keep asking with their eyes and which I can never answer. I see!

Listen. I will tell you two stories.

One day I told my students (freshmen at a prominent east-coast university) to pull out a piece of paper. They all did. I told them to print their names in the upper right-hand corner. They all did. I told them to title the paper "A Syllabus of Syllables," and then underline the title. They all did. I told them to write the following syllables next to the numbers: "ge, sha, la, urb, orb, go, vin, sko, sti, cer." They all did. I told them to form a word from each of the syllables. They asked me a few questions - they wanted to be sure exactly what it was I wanted from them - and then they all hunched over their papers and did it. I told them to fold the paper in half. Deborah asked which way. I said lengthwise. Then I told them to hand in their papers. They all did. I stood there with a handful of 15 papers folded lengthwise. Everybody was looking at me.

Not one of them asked me why we were doing this. Not one of them told me to go screw myself. Not one of them - not one - even looked at me strange.

Why should they? Nothing strange had happened. This was school. School is where you give up your power, you do what you're told, and you don't ask questions. In school, we all learn not to care anymore, not even to care that we're being humiliated, because everybody keeps telling us that we're being educated.

Another time, later in the semester, I walked into class purposely late. They were all seated, talking. I sat down and looked around. They stopped talking and looked at me. I looked back and said nothing. They kept looking at me. I kept saying nothing. It went on for about five minutes clock time, but it seemed like an eternity. Finally, Russell asked the class, "Why isn't anybody saying anything?" Nobody answered. Then Marilyn asked me, "Why aren't you saying anything?"

"What do you want me to say?" I asked.
"I don't know. Run the class, I guess."
"It's your class, You run it."

She looked at me as if I had just asked her to stand on her head and bounce out of the room. They all began to realize that something was happening here and everybody began talking. Different people were putting it in different words, but the message was for me to take power. I either said no or just said nothing and watched. One or two students tried to get things started by running the class as I would have run it.

"No," said Miriam, "don't you see that's what he's trying to tell us? We can't do things his way!"

They didn't know what to do. They were stuck. Then they started getting mad, first at each other, then at me.

"Teach us something. It's your job," complained Terry.
"I'll be glad to. What do you want to know?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know what you want to know?"
"Yes."
"No."

Then I got mad and said sarcastic things. Then they got mad and started defending themselves and accused me of being unfair.

Things went on like that all class. By the end of the hour, two had broken down in tears, five or six had just up and left, one had stormed out and slammed the door muttering nasty things, one just kept repeating, "I'm so confused, I'm just so confused, I don't know what I'm doing here."

Oh yes, I know what the schools teach, Superintendent Grimmel. They don't teach anything. What schools do is socialize. The main function of our schools is to produce good Americans, small humble helpless people who look and think and dress and talk and hope alike, mechanical people programmed to tumble from school into ticky-tacky houses and fit into the machine. Some fit high, some low, but the purpose of the schools is to produce parts for the machine.

America is the machine, we are the parts. Factories need workers, corporations need executives, offices need secretaries, and schools need superintendents. Everybody must fit. But the slots aren't very big, and the human spirit is huge, so you have to whittle people down pretty small to fit them in, and that takes a long time, so school takes many years. And nobody really wants to get whittled down like that, nobody really wants to be made small and afraid, nobody really wants to have the God pumped out of them, so let's make school compulsory! Let's kidnap the little gods and put them in yellow buses and transport them to schools. They have to come and get made puny by law.

I was once talking to a high-school kid and asked him what year he was in. He said, "I only got two more years to serve." He wasn't trying to be funny. It was a slip of the tongue.

I am sure you are not a bad person, Superintendent Grimmel. I bet many of your teachers are good, gentle, loving people. But because they are working for a system, they are the system, and they will teach my daughter the teachings of the system.

I know what you will teach her.

You will teach her first that she needs a teacher to teach her. That knowledge and power come from the outside. The message is that she doesn't know anything inside herself, she's an empty ignorant helpless vessel that must be filled. I can't begin to tell you how wrong that is.

You will teach her that she is not a person but a role: a little girl, bright child, advanced reader, first-grader, sophomore, Phi Beta Kappan, graduate, Ph.D. She will look up to those in superior roles, and down at those in inferior roles, but she will not look straight at people, behind the roles, at the persona and the God in the person. In time, she will begin to identify with her role. She will forget who she really is. In every sense of the word, she will then be lost.

You will teach her that she is weak and that authority is strong. In the name of practicality, you'll suck the fight out of her. I really hate it when Greta fights with me, but I hope she never stops.

Above all, you will teach her fear. First, she will fear teachers and then all grown-ups. She will fear failure, which means that she will fear endeavor. She will grow to fear the feelings natural to a human being and a little girl - feelings of terror, rage, vulnerability, power, and love. She will grow numb to the best stuff inside her. She will be ripped and uprooted out of her own dark human soil, and like the rest of us she'll be left to rot in the dryness of her intellect.

You will teach her that life is compromise and choices are limited. Some nice teacher will give her the choice to write a paper about her summer vacation or about her neighborhood, but I don't think that the teacher will give my daughter the choice to write whatever she wants, including nothing at all - and that's the choice that takes the bullshit out of the other choices.

You will teach her that there are places and activities of her own little glorious body that are ugly and dirty. That will be a subtle teaching, although the first time that Greta gets insecure in school and sticks her fingers in her vagina, the scene will probably not be subtle.

I wonder what you'll teach her the first time she calls you a "piss-ass." She calls me a "piss-ass" all the time. I call her a "piss-ass" back, which makes her laugh. Will you, Superintendent Grimmel, laugh with Greta when she comes to your office and calls you a "piss-ass?"

You will teach her competition. It won't take long for her to realize that her 'A' means nothing unless her friend Julie gets a 'B', better an 'F', so in some deep corner inside her Greta will be hoping failure for Julie. Hoping failure for your best friend (Rusty Swartz! Forgive me, I loved you!) is an evil thing, and schools are evil for doing that to people. Schools corrupt friendship. Where there is supposed to be equality, trust, and cooperation, you put hierarchy, fear, and competition. People secretly competing with each other never look each other square in the eye because their real loving selves are hiding under their scared competitive selves, and who wants anyone to see that in your eyes? Do you really think I will allow you to tamper with my daughter's clear gaze?

You will teach her that the purpose of learning is a good grade and a teacher's approval. You will move the source of her own sense of achievement - her very pride, joy, and independence - outside herself into an authority. When little Johnny gets that 'A', he feels great, but if he gets a 'D', he is wretched with shame and guilt. You will make my daughter dependent on the outside world for her own opinion of herself. In the end, she'll be like you and me, like all of us who went through it, looking out of scared squirrel eyes always asking everybody, "Am I okay? Am I okay?" Not by accident but on purpose, at the very center of their purpose, schools make people feel not okay. Who else but people who felt not okay, people emptied out of all their hard proud stuff, would willingly fit into this social system? Schools rip the You out of you, and by the time you're done, you sit there burnt-out, gutted, soft as mush, ready to do what you're told. Then they call your name and you go up and get your diploma.

You will teach her that at age five she should know her alphabet and at six she should know how to read, at nine she should know this, and at ten that. There is one clock in all your schools, and it tells time for everybody. I don't know who first suggested that the human spirit grows at the same rate in every human being, but whoever did should take a walk in the woods during spring and see if a maple buds the same week as an oak. Superintendent Grimmel, you're going to tell Greta that she should read at six, when maybe she won't want to read until she's ten. Maybe she has better things to do. When she wants to learn how to read, she will come to me and say, "Papa, help me learn how to read," and I will. It will take a month. We'll have a ball. And for the rest of her life, she will learn what she needs to know when she needs to know it. Her learning will always be a voluntary inner response to an inner need. If she needs a book or a teacher or even a school, she'll find all of those. But it will always be her need, not your curriculum.

You'll teach her all about time. The school day runs from 8 to 2:30. For 50 minutes you sit in a room and then a bell rings and for 5 minutes you walk through the halls and then a bell rings. Don't be late. Pink slip. Time's up. Tick-tock. But kids' time is timeless, they live in one vast moment, and it is a great sin to put them in time, and time in them. Oh, I know, it will happen to Greta eventually, and to some extent it already has. She too will forget that she floats in a sea of eternity, but please, not when she's five for heaven's sake.

Somehow she'll learn that sex is bad and genitals giggly. Somewhere along the line she'll learn that you don't cry or shout in public, and you don't get mad at grown-ups, and you hold in burps and cover yawns and apologize for sneezes. She'll end up saying "Please" and "Thank you" when she doesn't mean it. She'll probably grow up being rational instead of intuitive, cool and judicious instead of hot and spontaneous. She'll talk softly, think small, and write like a corpse. Somehow the message will get to her that the purpose of life is work and the purpose of work is money, she will be somewhat of a sexist and somewhat of a racist and somewhat of a patriot. Probably she'll end up being a consumer, and she'll think that consuming will bring her happiness. And she'll get the message that you really can't do much to change things, that ya better like what ya get kid because you are powerless.

Probably no one will ever actually tell her this crap, but there's an osmosis that goes on in your schools, and the medium is the message, so she'll get it. Oh boy, will she get it.

God help her, she gets a lot of this stuff from me and Jane and her grandparents and playmates. I know that everything I have said schools will teach her she will learn anyway. It's called growing up in America. It's also called falling from grace, and it seems to happen to all of us. I know that Greta will not be spared, whether or not she goes to school. But with all the forces threatening the integrity of her soul, and with such a long hard battle ahead of her, she doesn't have to face the Goliath of your schools too.

So, if she doesn't go to school, how will Greta learn, you may be asking yourself. But I am more concerned with, What will Greta learn? You see, I don't really care if Greta knows where Guatemala is, or who the President of Ethiopia is, or how to write a compound sentence, or what seven times seven is. While all the other little children are learning that stuff, Greta might be out in the garden with Jane learning how to grow pole beans. Or she might be in the woods with me learning how to cut down a tree for wood. If Greta never learns to distinguish a noun from a verb, she still might learn how to distinguish a black maple from a sugar maple and know which one to tap. While all those other little children are learning how to add and conjugate and type, Greta might be learning how to survive in a world that is falling apart around our ears. Given the state of the world today -the shortages, the pollution, the horror of the cities, the horror of our weapons - can you, Superintendent Grimmel, say with confidence what a person will have to know in order to make it in this world in twenty years? I am scared about what's happening in the world, and scared for my daughter. Things are much too serious for her to be wasting time in school.

Not to mention all the time I want her to be playing, purely playing, instead of sitting in a seat in a classroom learning.

And while all those other little children are learning where Guatemala is and who is the President of Ethiopia, Greta, alone out in the woods, might be learning where she is and who is the Lord of the Universe. Maybe she'll never talk to a guidance counselor, but maybe she'll talk to an angel. I'll tell you what. If you start offering courses like Introduction to Wisdom, and Advanced Happiness, and Fundamentals of Ecstasy, I'll consider sending Greta to your schools.

An old friend of mine met Greta for the first time this morning, and said, "You know, your daughter... there's something special about her... a light in her face. I don't know what it is... just a light." I know what it is. It is the light of God which we are all born with. The light dims and flickers as we grow up, and in some of us it is all but out. Some of us, like me, lose it for a long long time, and then in some mirror we get a flash of it, and then lose it again, but we've seen it, there it was, our real self, our peace, God - and then we know that for the rest of our lives our job is to find that light again.

"Ye are the Light of the world." We are. We really are.

My daughter's face radiates light. Light spills from her as she strides. She dances and spins in light.

She hasn't lost it yet. Not much of it anyway. I bathe in it. I am fierce in my protection of it, like any animal fighting for the life of its young. If I have said extreme things, that is why. I am sorry to be extreme. I think schools are extreme.

Please excuse my daughter from school today.

Sincerely,

Robert Alter

Study: Listening to Rap Music Associated with Alcohol, Drugs, Violence

2006-04-30T00:14:00.000-06:00

So long as there is no hypothesis concerning causation, only a statement of correlation, does this belong in the "duh" file?

BERKELEY, Calif., April 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Young people who listen to rap and hip hop music are more likely to have problems with alcohol, drugs and violence than listeners of other types of music, a new study shows. The link to these problems raises serious questions about the alcohol industry's use of rap and hip hop to market products, the study author said.

A survey of more than 1,000 community college students found that rap music was consistently associated with alcohol use, potential alcohol use disorder, illicit drug use and aggressive behavior. Alcohol and illicit drug use were also associated with listening to techno and reggae. The results were not affected by the respondents' gender or ethnicity.

"People should be concerned about rap and hip hop being used to market alcoholic beverages, given the alcohol, drug and aggression problems among listeners," said lead author Meng-Jinn Chen, Ph.D., a research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation's (PIRE) Prevention Research Center. "That's particularly true considering the popularity of rap and hip hop among young people."

Rap and hip hop artists and music have been used in advertisements for malt liquor and other alcohol products, while the urban contemporary music radio format, which features rap and hip hop, is regularly used for alcohol advertising.

The study, published in the May issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol, surveyed over 1,000 students aged 15 to 25. Students were asked about their music listening habits, alcohol use, illicit drug use and aggressive behaviors -- such as getting into fights and attacking or threatening others. Researchers emphasize that the survey results cannot determine whether listening to certain music genres leads to alcohol or illicit drug use or aggressive behavior. But young people with tendencies to use alcohol or illicit drugs or to be aggressive may be drawn to particular music styles.

"While we don't fully understand the relationship between music preferences and behavioral outcomes, our study shows that young people may be influenced by frequent exposure to music lyrics that make positive references to substance abuse and violence," Meng-Jinn said.

Recent studies of popular music reveal that nearly half of rap/hip hop songs mentioned alcohol as compared to 10 percent or less of other popular genres. Nearly two-thirds of rap songs mentioned illicit drugs as compared with one-tenth of songs from other genres. Rap and rock music videos depict violence twice as often as other music genres.

The PIRE study, entitled "Music, Substance Use and Aggression," also found that young people who listen to reggae and techno use more alcohol and illicit drugs than listeners of other music, with the exception of rap. Rap topped all other genres in association to alcohol and drug use and aggression.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which sponsors the PIRE Prevention Research Center, funded the study. PIRE is a national nonprofit public health research institute with centers in seven cities.

Dialectology, cont.

2006-04-02T21:47:00.000-06:00

Remembered another:

A minute, used to mean a very long time. As in, How long's it been now? He's sure been gone for a minute. Yea, definitely, for a good part of a minute.

Dialectology, cont.

2006-04-02T17:13:00.000-06:00

As an addendum to the first "Dialectology" post, in which I mentioned that the final s is often dropped by my students, as it is in some regional dialects of Spanish:

I just noticed, though I've heard it probably hundreds of times, that my students almost always pronounce I.S.S. (In-School Suspension) as eye ess ehh.

Thesis Statements

2006-04-02T16:55:00.000-06:00

Before the state writing test we had a lesson on thesis statements, for which I wrote maybe six or ten essay prompts on the board. Throughout the class we wrote thesis statements for essays corresponding to all of them. In order to use prompts most like those that might appear on the test, I took them from a list published by the Mississippi Department of Education. One of the prompts on that list asked for an informative essay explaining the reasons "why your school is a good school."

I hesitated before putting that prompt on the board. I didn't want to invite cynicism or incite bitterness, or to draw attention to anything unhelpful to our discussion of thesis statements. But I thought, Who's being cynical? Isn't it ugly of me even to hesisitate? To have such a thought occur to me? I put it up with the rest of them.

And of my six classes, the number in which that prompt became a joke, a distraction, an opportunity to make loud pronouncements about lying in essays: all six.

Essays

2006-04-02T16:15:00.000-06:00

Students in the 10th grade in Mississippi must take a multiple-choice English exam and an essay writing exam. These tests must be passed to graduate high school, and the current school accountability models are tied to them. The writing exam presents students with four essay prompts: two "informative" essay prompts, and two "narrative" essay prompts. Students are to write essays corresponding to one of the two prompts in each mode. So, despite my own distaste for the formula, unabated since I was trained to write the five-paragraph exam essay myself, we spent quite a lot of time preparing to write these essays, going over the difference between the "modes" (writing "off-mode" is an instant zero), and practicing with countless essays in each.

Then, three weeks before the test, in the middle of a lesson on narrative essays, the counselor enters my room to tell me that she just got word the state board has eliminated the narrative essay requirement. These students will not be tested on narrative writing. Upperclassmen who have still not passed will not be required to pass.

A few days later, in class at Ole Miss, I got the opportunity to speak with somebody powerful from Jackson (assistant state superintendent?). I told her how many hours we had spent preparing for this test -- hours which could have been spent working on the informative essays, or on the components of the multiple choice test, or having conversations, or (dare I say it?) reading books -- and I told her that I saw it as irresponsible to make this move three weeks before the test, and I asked her for some sort of explanation. The explanation was vague and brief (alluding to high failure rates, presumably in schools that shouldn't have high failure rates), and she fed me a line about its being important to teach the narrative mode even in the absence of the test. Which is bullshit. Many of my students are marginally literate. Hardly any read competently. What they most need is what test preparation least gives them, but the test is standing between them and graduation; and it stands between the school and a designation indicating some degree of success, and the benefits that such designation confers. I have wasted hours preparing them for a test that now they don't have to take, though they still have to take others. These have been wasted hours, and when there aren't hours to waste.

I'm afraid this decision might not be merely irresponsible, but sinister. Is it unreasonable to suspect that the English II teachers in Oxford and Tupelo knew about this decision, or at least heard whispers of it, months ago?

Dialectology, cont.

2006-04-02T14:14:00.000-06:00

More features of the local dialects:

The double modal. The doubling of modal auxiliaries is somewhat widely known and identified with Southern speech, but I had never heard it "in the wild" until coming here. Unlike many other Southern dialectical features, it seems not to correlate with social class, at least insofar as I have been exposed to wide enough a range to say so. I don't know if this is the result of upward mobility and the deterioration of the South's old social classes, or if it was always thus. I have heard them most from Dr. Mullins (Executive Assistant to the Chancellor of Ole Miss; co-founder of the Mississippi Teacher Corps), who usually doubles his modals at least once or twice during every class he teaches. I have heard my students use them also, but much more rarely. Common examples are might could and might should. Past tenses are formed might'a could and might'a should. Dr. Mullins often says may can (it may can help you. . . .) A similar construction that I've had a hard time categorizing, though I don't think it is strictly a double modal (a modified progressive?) is you don't suppose to be, as in, you don't suppose to be usin' pencil anyway. Actually, that would more likely be said, you don't suppose to be usin' pencil noway.

Use of noway as anyway.

I'm is, meaning I am. An emphatic. Not used for simple predication (for that the copula would be dropped, or [with an aspectual distinction?] replaced with be). Viewing the verb system objectively, this is a rich addition, as the standard dialect has no special emphatic for to be (you can't say I do am, unfortunately, as you can with other verbs) and the emphasis can only be expressed with intonation.

Blood meaning blood pressure, as in, I get faint 'cause my blood low. See sugar and sinuses in previous post.

To brag on x. I don't think I'd ever heard brag with the preposition on (instead of about) before coming here. This might be a usage for a broad swath of the country rather than the South specially; I considered that perhaps my own dialect prefers the minority usage, but the Oxford American Dictionary reflects only mine, and a Google search for "brag about" returns 4.95 million hits, while one for "brag on" returns 230,000. Nevertheless, I've heard it used by very many people here, including those who are not from Mississippi, though I don't think I've heard my mother use it, and she was raised in Nashville. Mississippians seem to use it exclusively.

Behind as a textual location, meaning after. When correcting sentences at the board, and students call out where to place, say, a comma, they say, for instance, behind 'place' rather than after 'place.' When seeking a location in a sentence, a preposition with a word in that sentence can only mean two things: before the word or after it. It nevertheless took me a while to understand that behind means after.

And, briefly, some slang:

Got ya covered or got ya faded (?), meaning, sure, or no problem.

To be straight, meaning, to understand one another, to have no problems, to be on the same page. As in, Do you understand? Is there a problem? Nah, we straight.

Bet (?) as an emphatic affirmative. It took me a very long time to understand what this word was, as it is pronounced quickly like an explosion through the lips, and the t may or may not become a light glottal stop. For a long time I thought it was beh or peh. It can be used to agree with something, or simply as a celebration. As in, Do you want to go to lunch five minutes early? Bet! or, upon receiving a scored test with high marks, Bet! Perhaps a contraction of you bet?

Gutter as adjective meaning hood, thug, gangsta, etc. Unfortunately used widely with some degree of approval or admiration. In a class discussion of September 11, the war in Iraq, and terrorism, in reference to the Jordanians who own and operate several gas stations here, We got A-rabs in Sardis, Mr. Pollack, but they straight gutta!

Womb, vulgar slang, as substantive for sexual intercourse (to get some womb). May or may not refer generally to female genitalia.

Crucial, meaning intense, serious, troubling, etc. That movie was crucial!

Somewhat more broadly on the subject of dialect, I read an interesting usage recently in some national magazine (I forget which -- Smithsonian?). An educated adult, some teacher or researcher, said of something that it "reminds a boy that school is crucial to their mission in life." I was struck by the pronoun. We are all accustomed to using the plural as a non-specific singular ("Somebody forgot to put their name on their paper."), which is presumably to avoid the old, sexist use of the masculine when the sex of the antecedent is not specified. But in the sentence from the magazine, the sex of the antecedent is specified as masculine, and the plural is used anyway, which looks like the plural is perhaps becoming the non-specific third person pronoun, regardless of the specificity of the sex -- which is to say, only specifically identified persons receive a gendered pronoun.

A Procedure That's Worked

2006-04-02T13:21:00.000-06:00

Following the lead of the state test (if you can't beat 'em. . .), which must be taken again and again until passed, I've instituted a policy that all small tests and quizzes must be passed by 70% of the class or they will be taken again by that class the following week, and, if necessary, the following week, etc. Tests are modified slightly, or have the questions rearranged, to discourage cheating on subsequent sittings. The most dramatic success was my sixth period, which on one test went from about 20% passing the first time to 100% passing the third. No class has yet gone more than three tries on the same test. Astonishingly, every class has improved its test performance even on the first try. I had expected improvements on the second and third tries, as they study more to make the damn thing go away, but what accounts for the improvement on the first try? Are they studying in order not to be blamed by classmates for forcing a retest? On one occasion, exceeding or falling short of 70% depended on the performance of a student who had been absent when the test was given. I tried not to let on to that fact, but the class figured it out, of course, and the pressure on him was immense, especially since he's not a particularly studious student. He got 100%.

This procedure also creates some competition between class periods. Students in classes that pass on the first or second try ask how many other classes are still taking it. Many of them want to be the first class to reach 70% passing.

Blogger Sucks, Part II

2006-03-30T20:29:00.000-06:00

The response from Blogger Support:

Hi Robert,

Thanks for notifying us of this issue. We had a number of unplanned outages in early February, resulting in various problems in Blogger and BlogSpot, including a number of cases in which posts would be lost when users republished their blogs. The full details were posted on our status page (http://status.blogger.com) at that time, though things should be working normally now. We apologize for the problems this has caused, but please be assured that we are actively working on preventing this from happening again, and on improving the reliability of Blogger and BlogSpot. Thank you for your patience.

Sincerely,
Blogger Support

Thanks to Hayden for digging up the cached copies on Bloglines.

Dialectology [Repost]

2006-03-30T20:28:00.000-06:00

I have been fascinated by the particulars of the dialect of English spoken by my students (and some other teachers and staff), and its divergence from my own dialect (and from the somewhat artifical standard). I've begun compiling a list of features, in no particular order, and what follows is a non-exhaustive sample.

Sugar as a noun for diabetes. When told not to chew gum or eat candy in class, students will sometimes claim that they need it because they "have sugar." The teacher with the classroom next door (and who is from the area) has said to me, "I don't have sugar per se, but I'm border-line, and I like to keep a snack around."

Sinuses as a noun for allergies. When a sniffling student with red, watery eyes is asked how he is feeling, he might respond, "I'm okay, I just got sinuses." (Responding with the information that we all have sinuses is met with blank stares.)

There are several peculiarities of prepositions, the most strange to me the use of on with relative days or times: "On tomorrow we will hold a meeting," "on yesterday we won the game," "on this evening we have a lot of homework." It's perhaps not so strange when one realizes that the same preposition is perfectly standard and conventional for absolute dates ("on the 15th," "on Thursday," "on Thanksgiving"). Still, I wonder where this use came from.

More widely known (from rap music?) is the redundant preposition: "it stinks up in here," "get yourself up out of here."

Evening is often used where I would say afternoon. When we have a faculty meeting after school (3:00), teachers say that we have a meeting this evening. I believe I've even had my sixth and seventh period students come to me in the morning to ask about what we'd be doing this evening.

Supper is the word for dinner. It sounds archaic and folksy to me, but it's the first word used for the evening meal. I'm not sure if dinner presents connotative differences or if it is simply unused. (I believe the local way precedes my own, since I think etymology suggests that dinner should mean breakfast.)

To lose one's manners as a verb meaning to fart. I hear this one every day. "Mr. Pollack! Somebody done lost his manners over here!"

Na'un. I'm still unsure of this one. I'm fumbling to spell it phonetically (the vowels are different enough here that I have trouble replicating or reliably remembering them). This word (construction?) is not particularly common, but I've heard it several times, and always as a negation when two (or more?) options are presented. Is it a contraction of neither one? Of neither of them? Of (could it even be?) nary a one?

Carry as a very broad verb meaning to take or to escort. May be used even of people, as in, "She carried us to Memphis when she got a job there," or, "He carried her to the movies for a date."

The Mississippi Long U. (Is it the Delta Long U? Is it shared by any white populations?) Sometimes it sounds like an r is being interposed after every long u, sometimes like a German ö (or oe, as in Goethe). It's very clear in words like community, excuse, computer, cute, which can almost sound like commurnity, excurse, compurter, curt. I've got a student whose last name is Hughes, and it's very clear there, too.

Dropped copula on predicate nominatives (as in Greek or Latin -- which likeness comes as a great surprise to my students). I think this construction is recognized and understood everywhere in the English-speaking world(as a result of movies? music?): "He working right now," "You sick?"

Well known, again, is the use of the verb to be very differently than in my own or the standard dialect, though I'm not sure I understand the morphological distinctions. There might be a distinction between a phrase that drops the copula and one that uses to be: "You happy" vs. "you be happy." If there is a distinction (of aspect?), I'm not sure what it is. Most of the standard conjugations of to be seem not to be used much (despite my pesterings to use them when writing S.A.E. -- Standard American English -- essays).

The third-person singular verb is never conjugated, which is another widely recognized feature of Southern and of African American speech, though it is quite unsurprising phonetically: the final s is almost never pronounced. It is not a peculiarity of third-person verbs. No s is pronounced at the ends of plural nouns, of genitive nouns, or even of many words which ordinarily ends in the letter. "My friend's car" becomes "my friend car;" "all my friends go" becomes "all my friend go." Sometimes some kids will even pronounce a word like glass as glah, though this is less common, and the missing s seems to become an aspiration. (It is interesting that Spanish dialects in much of Latin America do the same thing -- and are even similarly associated with rural areas and lower economic classes, I think. Spanish even does it with a medial s, [in Buenos Aires, obelisco is just as often obelihhh-co] but I don't think I've heard that in Mississippi.)

Another widely known: the healthy reflexive verb, as in, "I ate me some food."

One of the first features I noticed, which I had never heard before and which is totally ubiquitous is the inverted syntax on questions. "What is that?" becomes "What that is?"

The dummy pronoun on existential to be is it, not there as in my dialect and the standard. Thus, "there is something" becomes "it is something." I still can't force my ear to hear this construction as existential, and have to perform a conscious translation each time. I've explained this to my students with the insight that there's no reason for any pronoun there apart from convention (in Spanish, for instance, one uses the verb haber) but they didn't seem particularly interested.

The pluperfect verb seemingly to introduce a preterite narrative. The most common use is the phrase, "what had happened is" to begin a story in the past-tense. The pluperfect is not generally used again once the narrative has been so introduced. I don't think it should be heard as a pluperfect, just as an indication of the tense of the whole narrative to follow. (My kids don't much use perfects or pluperfects in the standard way, I think, and I'm not sure if they hear in them the distinction that I do -- again, an analog to Spanish or French.)

Trying to as a verbal phrase to mean wanting to or about to or starting to, which may be used for inanimate objects. "My tooth is trying to hurt."

Ain't as a past-tense negation. Of course I'm familiar and comfortable with ain't, but don't think I had ever known it to be used in the past-tense. "I ain't know" (for "didn't know").

Room for class. "Mr. Pollack, what grade am I getting in your room?" Once, when my class was in the library, someone referred to "this room" but they meant my class, and not the library.

I will add more as I discover or remember them.

On the "Reading Wars" [Repost]

2006-03-30T20:27:00.000-06:00

What follows is a response to "The Reading Wars" by Nicholas Lehmann, Atlantic Monthly, November 1997. This article was given to me and my classmates by Dr. Mullins, who requested a response. It discusses the controversy over the relative merits of the phonics and "whole-language" methods of reading instruction, which apparently raged in California during the 1990s.]

It is clear, of course, that there is no simple solution to the eponymous "wars," and there is probably no simple response to the debate that comprehends its complexity and that treats both sides with fairness. I am left believing that I cannot justly take a position on the relative merits of the phonics and whole-language methods of reading instruction because I remain too aware of my ignorance about them. I gather the basic distinction, or at any rate I believe that I do, but I am not at all clear about the theoretical bases of either, and am not informed of any persuasive data (all data presented in the article, as it readily admits, are politicized and muddy).

It seems to me that phonics is informed by the history of writing, while whole-language is informed by the experience of fluent reading. (I do not mean with this impression to denigrate or to elevate either of them.) The association of image to sound is fundamental to all true alphabets (as opposed to ideograms), and while it remains particularly vivid in many written languages, over the last several centuries it has become less clear in written English. English spelling today is as indicative of etymology and historical pronunciation as it is of contemporary pronunciation. "Sounding out" words, especially bigger words, seems essentially to be a process of decoding gibberish that sounds close enough to an already-known word to recognize the likeness; and thus children ploddingly read: chuh-ill-duh-ren, chuhilduhrehn, CHILDREN! It is no longer the case in English, as it is in many languages, that a competent reader can, upon encountering a new word in writing, know with certainty how to pronounce it. Nevertheless, the spelling is by no means arbitrary, and the association, though it may in cases seem tenuous, is not altogether absent. So teaching the sounds and their association to letters and letter-combinations seems a reasonable and historically obvious approach.

Fluent reading, however, is quite unlike sounding-out words. Upon reflection, fluent reading appears to be a remarkable and mysterious mental phenomenon. We who read expertly do not sound out words. We recognize the same symbols as associated to different sounds in different circumstances, sometimes according to syntactical rules so subtle we are not consciously aware of them (and sufficiently complicated that we could not keep track of them quickly enough to read even if we were conscious of them). Other times the discrepancy is arbitrary, and known only from experience. Indeed, we hardly notice individual letters. We recognize whole syllables, or whole words, or often even whole phrases, seemingly as single units. If we are actually analyzing the words as children do who are learning to read, we do it with the remarkable capacity of those subconscious faculties that allow us to stand and walk, while small children still compelled to control their muscles consciously must concentrate to stay upright, and nevertheless teeter and fall. Indeed, the experience of fluent reading seems to be holistic, not particularly analytical, and since all reading must eventually reach this place to be fluent, it seems fair enough a notion to nurture it deliberately.

Perhaps the most prudent path involves both methods – a foundation in phonics to introduce written language to the individual in the same way it was introduced to society, followed by a "whole-language" nurturing of whatever faculty of mind allows us to read without conscious analysis. Or maybe such is a diluted middle-path that misunderstands the basis and benefit of each method, and would be worse than either of the two in isolation. I simply don't know enough to say. I can say, however, that I am somewhat surprised at the controversy, since it has seemed from my own clouded view that the central problem of literacy has had less to do with the particulars of first-grade reading lessons than with actual exposure to words and books and reading in all subsequent years. However kids first learn to turn marks on paper into language, they need to keep doing it, but most of them stop. Maybe the particulars of earliest instruction do exert some influence over the manner and time of their stopping, but I am inclined to think that the stopping itself is the most basic problem that needs to be faced, and the political "war" in California does not seem to have much awareness of it.

Blogger Sucks

2006-03-29T18:53:00.000-06:00

I've completely lost two posts. They vanished. Something was fishy the night I posted them, because I remember that the first vanished before I posted the second, but I still had the first in a separate file so I reposted it. Now they've disappeared, and Blogger Support doesn't seem to help much, as all their suggestions are clearly aimed at technically un-savvy users who might, say, delete their own posts by mistake.

I sent them an email and am still waiting for a response. I presume both posts are gone forever, which is lousy, since I can't even remember what one of them was, and the other was a long-ish list/lexicon of dialectical features I've noticed in my students' usage, and I spent quite a long time writing that one. I still have the rough list, but I'm not eager to re-write. I wish I could even remember what the other post was.

Maybe I'll move the blog to another provider.

Nobody happened to cache a copy they still have floating around, did they?

A Passer-By Comments

2006-03-26T23:07:00.000-06:00

I received an interesting comment to an old post:

I visited the area in the early 70s with Bobbie Lee herself. At that time I worked with her in Las Vegas. We have remained friends ever since. Much of the area in and around the famed Tallahatche Bridge is not what it was 30 years ago, actually poorer. It is in Chickasaw County, not far from Greenwood Mississippi. The bridge was, back then, almost unuseable. The so-called Choctaw Ridge is just one of many areas identified by the locals as "up on the ridge", all with various little names. It is unlikely any map would identify the exact location of a Choctaw Ridge, people of the area called the same place different things. I can only say it is a real place, and probably long forgotten by most in the area now.

This is interesting, though "Chickasaw County" is not especially near to Greenwood, and the Tallahatchie River does not enter it. History is strange.

I've not posted anything in quite a while. Stress and procrastination are partners. I'll add a few posts soon.

Ethnic Frameworks

2005-12-07T04:37:00.000-06:00

I believe I've already written in this blog about my students' interest in my "race," about their sometimes identifying me as "Spanish but not Mexican" and somewhat widely as "Middle Eastern;" even, however surprisingly to me, as Iraqi.

I don't recall if I mentioned that a young boy from the elementary or grade school, and who is white but ethnically ambiguous, was in the Homecoming parade, and that for several days I had students telling me that they saw my son in the parade. Upon my denying that I had any son they insisted that I've "been down here before!" (Though I couldn't have been older than twelve when this boy was born.)

Last week we discussed literary allusion, and the particular allusion in the story we were reading was to Adam and Eve. When I went through the familiar story, a student exclaimed, "I thought you was Jewish."

My non-response response was that, actually, somebody's being Jewish or not wouldn't matter, because this story and so many other Biblical ones are very important to secular literature, and besides, the Adam and Eve story is in the Old Testament of Christian Bibles, which means it's also included in Jewish Bibles.

A different student's non-response response, almost whispered to herself: "You do look Jewish."

(I remain surpised that though they might have never heard the name Christopher Columbus, they might believe most Americans are black, they might not know that Hitler was German, "looking Jewish" nevertheless means something for some of them.)

Impromptu Lessons

2005-12-07T04:23:00.000-06:00

There are a group of somewhat crazy black veterans in Ellison's Invisible Man, and the difference between the treatment of blacks in Europe and in the American South in the first half of the 20th Century, as well as the political and cultural influence of that difference, were important subjects in my honors English class at several times this year. And now we're reading Death of a Salesman, for which the subject of post-war America has come up. I discovered in all of this that most of my honors students know the name Hitler, but don't know who he was, what he did, or what war or movement he was associated with.

Another time I learned that a majority of that, the honors, class believed that there are more blacks than whites in America today.

Last week, helping a student with a question in the grammar text book, I found that this student (this one not in the honors class) had no particular associations with the name Christopher Columbus. It didn't ring a bell.

Where do you even begin?

Excursions

2005-12-07T04:10:00.000-06:00

One day, at about 9:45, a student from the office comes around announcing that an assembly will be held at 10:00. There is no P.A. system, and this level of organization is by no means suspicious, so ten minute later my class and every other class on my hall marches to the auditorium. We find it empty, and are told the assembly is not until the next day.

Another day, at a similar time, I get a message from the asst. principal that I need to take my students to the auditorium and report to the conference room. Class stops, and we go. I find that I had been called to an emergency meeting of the discipline committee to discuss a student who is to have a conference in mere minutes, and in order to ascertain that we all, in fact, agree that he be recommended to the alternative school. Twenty minutes later I find my class unattended in the auditorium, impressively well-behaved, and to a chorus of groans lead them back to class. (They asked me if I got a paddling.)

This Monday about ten minutes after the start of first period I get a message that I am to take my students to the library. I ask why, and where I am supposed to go myself, and I learn that I am going with three other teachers to Water Valley High School for the day to have a sort of mini-conference on how they improved their school. All of my classes sat in the library.

This semester I've had three conference days (one conference plus the Water Valley excursion) and one sick day. I have always had lesson plans and materials for the students to work on. I have not had a single substitute and those lessons and materials have always been ignored. If I'm not there, they sit.

A Semester

2005-12-07T03:18:00.000-06:00

I have a long row of index cards stapled to the wall above my dry-erase board, one for each week of school year. Red cards replace the white for the weeks of the state tests, and there is one black card that I move over every week. We've only got one card left until the half-way indicator. How time flies. (Especially when there's not ever enough of it.)

I don't think I've changed my mind much about education or approaches to teaching or management, though I've certainly made many small adjustments. I use fewer words, and am much more inclined to settle for imprecise or philosophically insufficient explanations (or rules, or procedures). They're just as unsatisfying and distasteful, but I've become somewhat more pragmatic about these instances when the answer that's satisfying to me won't get anybody anywhere. (I lie constantly. It's like a hobby. We need to move on, folks.)

I don't dress as well, either. I used to make it through the day with my tie all the way up and the top button fastened. Eventually I started pulling the tie down half an inch and unbuttoning the top button sometime during sixth period. Then, sometime during fifth. Then, at the start of third. Then second. Now sometimes before leaving the house. And I don't usually wear a tie at all on Fridays.

Sometimes I feel like I'm not really teaching, especially when I feel like I'm teaching for the state test. In some ways maybe my thoughts about school have become more like they were when I was a high school student myself. Maybe college and lofty ideas about education made it easier to forget some things. When I was in high school I sat in the back of most classes and read books, or slept. With a few exceptions, I usually felt like my time was being wasted, that I was being baby-sat, that I was being held in a pen because I couldn't be trusted on the street during the day until I was arbitrarily branded an adult. I certainly learned a lot, but I believed that most of it was learned not because of school, but despite it.

I am very uncomfortable wasting my students' time, and they often look at me like that's what I'm doing, and I'm often afraid that I agree with them. If only their resentment was like mine was, and consoled with J.D. Salinger or Dostoevsky. . . .

I don't want to teach a state-tested subject next year.

I probably would have melted down and quit if not for the regular excursions to Oxford. Certainly that is an enormous argument in favor of the Teacher Corps. I am compelled to admit that the principal benefits I have received there this fall have been with my colleagues Friday nights at the hotel, and Saturday lunches and evenings in the Square. Certainly I benefited on campus as well, especially in the afternoons when I met with the other English teachers, but the benefit balance tilts very heavily away from the time on campus; maybe the social nature of man requires that it be this way, but I wish the difference were subtler. I am looking forward to the different sort of class we'll have after the break.

The hardest is over, according to everybody who has anything to say about it.

Succession of Successes?

2005-12-07T02:19:00.000-06:00

I cannot very well "share a success [I] have had" (quoted from blog assignment sheet) since I neither know what success is or what it would look like. For most of my students it seems to mean leaving this place. I have wondered if it wouldn't be success for my district to be absorbed into this county's other (wealthier and more successful) school district. Or for the migration out of the Delta to be completed, leaving only cotton fields and robots to labor in them (which doesn't often seem harder than bringing jobs and good educations in).

It's fairly easy to come by stories of special exceptions, of gifted students, of one teacher who made a difference in one student's life; and I will not denigrate these stories. I must see them, however, as a very particular species of success, since they are defined as exceptions. World-savers and knights errant encounter in the Teacher Corps a kind of cynicism that often seems realistic, or a kind of realism that often seems cynical, and I'm not wholly at odds with it. But I'm still unsure of our reduction of "success" into a series of anecdotes that we can use to motivate ourselves on rainy days. We have not one success, but a whole swarm of them! (Even pinned, literally, like dead bees and butterflies, on cork.) There is pragmatism to this view, but I wish some more time were allowed -- pragmatic or not -- to the collective consideration of what that one success would look like.

Like all the gold coins in the construction-paper chest that Mrs. Monroe has placed on our Board of Success, we each have our little collection of treasures (to return to her explicit metaphor, and backing away from the entomological one). And sure enough, they are nice on rainy days. It felt like a little treasure when a slew of students first thought of me for letters of recommendation to some academic club. It felt like a little treasure when a student who received unsolicited letters from admissions departments inviting her to consider their schools thought that I would be the teacher she'd ask about the quality of those schools and for advice about them. And when another student, who rode on the hood of a car during the Homecoming Parade giving everybody the mechanical wrist-motion-minimizing Miss America wave, broke out of it for a second to wave at me like a normal person waves. And there are so many students who were very troublesome and openly hostile to me who are now only slightly troublesome and usually not hostile. My fifth period can now usually get to and from the cafeteria without a constant threat of chaos.

The anecdotes surely are like little treasures in their own way, and there are many more of them. But I'm happy to live without the little reassurances, with whatever uncertainty or tragedy that requires, in order to keep that bigger kind of success unmuddied and to keep my foolish heart and eye searching for it.

Reflections: My First Year of Teaching in the Mississippi Delta

2005-12-02T22:28:00.000-06:00

The difficulty of comparing my expectations of teaching in the Delta (in the economic and cultural Delta if a bit outside of the geographical one) to the reality is that they don’t feel like real categories. What were my expectations? What is the reality? There’s something of a fallacy even in the tenses of those verbs, and it seems to me that my expectations have been changing with my perceptions of the reality.

It is hard to remember what my earliest expectations were. I was told that all or nearly all of my students would be black. I was told that many or most would be poor. I was told that the Delta is still deeply segregated, and that blackness and poorness are not wholly unrelated conditions. Precisely how these facts came together in my mind, the impressions and the expectations that they first formed, are lost to me now, because they’ve been shifting so gradually and so consistently. What it means to be poor and black in Mississippi was surely no more than a vague notion in my mind last May, which coalesced into something clearer over the summer but continued to change. It changes still today, and though my students surely have a different and more intimate view of it than I do, I am not sure that even their view is unchanging and definitive.

I remember something of how distant actual teaching seemed this summer. The preparations of soldiers for battle was not an uncommon metaphor for our training as teachers, and though there’s something terribly wrong about that metaphor there are some things right about it, too. One of the things it gets right is how close and yet how far away the physical reality of war must seem to soldiers in training. Teaching was an idea for me, and it was a very vivid idea, but no more real than the vivid feeling of being involved in the story of a movie or book one is watching. It was still in my head, still a fantasy; and the me who was the principle character was the same fantasy-me that inhabits all of the books I read and the movies I see. One never does walk into the plot of the book or movie, and it’s rather startling to walk into some other vivid imagining. The actual-me, with all his stammers and awkwardnesses, suddenly finds himself in the role of his fantasy counterpart.

I must have expected to be a good teacher. I expected to bridge the divide between myself and my students, between my background and theirs, with sympathy and understanding. I knew I had to be firm, to manage my classroom with discipline, and I expected doing so to be difficult. Somehow I expected to have free time. I expected the job to be stressful, but I did not very vividly imagine the stress. I expected disorganization from the school and its administration, and I expected little support apart from my excursions to Oxford.

So what was the reality that I found? More audacious still, what is the reality? I don’t really know. I’m afraid any description I can make will be a superficial one. I was surprised by many things.

I was surprised by how taxing teaching can be -- or at least how taxing it is in the beginning. I did expect stress, but was somehow surprised by it (by its quality? by its degree?) nonetheless. I found that I was perhaps optimistic about the power of, or at least about the consistency of the power of sympathy and understanding. I must have known that not all battles can be won, but I think I was still surprised to find that some students don’t want any divides to be bridged. Or maybe they do want it, in the same way they really do want (as we so like to declare) order and rules and strictness and education. But just as so many of them seem deeply convicted, despite our declarations, that they don’t want those things, they are similarly convicted that they don’t want the divide that separates us to be bridged. I continue attempts at bridge-building and so many keep cutting the ropes.

For all the warnings of problems and disorganization and corruption in the educational system, for all my expectation of them, I think I was still surprised by them, or by how difficult they are to work around, or by how damaging they are to the business of a school. Maybe my expectations failed to account for the extent to which a teacher is a dependent part of a system. I probably would have agreed that a teacher cannot be a school unto himself, but the breadth and depth of that assertion were not assimilated into my expectations before the first days of school.

Still, I am a teacher, as I expected to be; and I have students, most of whom are not hostile to me and many of whom are actually interested in learning something. I expected steep hills and I was surprised by their steepness (though I probably expected to be so surprised). I do have hopes, and still some energy remaining to dedicate to them.

'Shots fired' in Sardis came from police dept.

2005-11-10T16:17:00.000-06:00

By Jason C. Mattox
(from the Panolian)

A shooting inside the Sardis Police Department Saturday night left one officer injured, Mayor Alvis 'Rusty' Dye said.

According to the mayor, officer Robert Turner was shot in the foot when a shotgun being unloaded by officer Daryl House went off.

"They were in the back of the department unloading the gun," he said. "When the gun went off, some of the pellets ricocheted and hit Turner in the foot."

Dye said Turner was treated for the gunshot wound at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Oxford. He is now recovering at his home in the city.

"The Panola County Sheriff's Department investigated the matter and determined the shooting was accidental," he said. "Officer House will return to duty today (Monday) and will not be placed on administrative leave."

[I clipped this article and had it sitting on my desk at school. A student saw it and said, "Shots fired! I hope it wasn't Daryl House!" Upon seeing that it was, he said, "That the second person he done shot!"]

Nobody Else Is Laughing

2005-09-30T21:54:00.000-06:00

(A little background, for anyone who wanders in: I am teaching in rural Mississippi. Essentially all of my students -- only one exception -- are black. I am not.)

We were going over subject-verb agreement, and the procedure for the day involved my reading aloud a list of sentences from the grammar book. Some had subjects and verbs that agreed, and some, according to the conventions of Standard American English, did not. I read to the students, and the students responded with corrections where applicable.

One of the sentences, a question I had to ask six class periods of my students, was as follows:

Does anyone want to help me make gefilte fish for the Passover feast?

(A few recognized "gefilte fish" from the movie Rush Hour, which I have not seen, but which I suppose might have been looking for comedy in a similar irony. And on a tangent: a local gang unknowingly uses the Magen David as its symbol. They are called G.D., an acronym I do not know, which they sometimes write G-D. My hall has a Star of David graffito next to the words G-D Block.)

Conduction by Induction and Deduction

2005-09-30T21:20:00.000-06:00

So we're being required by the Teacher Corps to reflect here on the respective problems and benefits of teaching, as they say, deductively and inductively, by which they mean telling the kids the point or letting them figure it out on their own.

Now, I am of the opinion that the only things that are really and meaningfully learned are the things that are pulled out from oneself, whether or not an explanation from someone else coincides with the internal motion. So it follows that "inductive" teaching is a kind of teaching with an expectation of what must happen anyway, but which may not; and "deductive" teaching does not expect it, requiring only memorization. Though of course the magic can happen there, too.

I would prefer not ever to tell the kids the point, and I admit feeling dastardly sometimes for having one. But of course high schools don't actually educate students; we train them. It is to me a sad condition, and I have not entirely resigned myself to its limitations, but I have basically accepted it. Students who are not interested in self-cultivation of any sort (not to speak of particularly academic efforts) do not easily engage difficult questions. They are accustomed to being baby-sat, to being kept occupied, to memorization and recitation. They sometimes grow angry when these expectations are not met. It is worth the trouble to anger them sometimes, but my energies are not limitless.

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, maybe with a comparable degree of wickedness: You teach the students you have, not the students you wish you had. What would Socrates do? He wouldn't be preparing fifteen-year-olds for a state test, I imagine.

So I lecture, and they ignore me, and fall asleep (better than outright disrespect). And I try to surprise them often, and provoke them sometimes, and maybe make them a little angry. The objectives that I am required from all sides to write on the board and which are slightly less empty than the words I use to write them are taught in my classroom overwhelmingly in the "deductive" mode, because my students take silent moments or gaps in my control as invitations to chaos. I hope that they are getting an inductive lesson too, though. It's not written on the board.

Classroom Management After Five Weeks

2005-09-08T21:16:00.000-06:00

Classroom Management Ball

My "classroom management plan," as I've been conditioned to call it, has changed in only one significant way after five weeks of teaching: the introduction of The Ball. My three afternoon classes have been markedly more rowdy than my three morning classes, and one day a couple of weeks ago, after too many desk numbers on the board (warnings) and too many check marks next to them (disciplinary assignments; 30-minute and 1-hour detentions; office referrals), with a classroom of squirming and rambunctious teenagers still talking over one another with decreasing order and increasing loudness, I had a vision of The Lord of the Flies. I grasped frantically for some sort of conch shell, for law and order, for some symbol of the power to speak; and I came to a large and heavy volume of excerpts from world literature which I had inherited with the classroom. I told the students that Only He Who Holds The Book May Utter Sound!, and, if only for its novelty, it worked. The failure of the book, however, was to be its heft: great for symbolism, bad for quickly transmitting the Power to Speak to a student on the other side of the room. I considered transmigrating its Power into a marker or some kind of smallish stick, and I remembered the red foam ball another teacher gave me before the first day of school (for stress-relieving squeezing), and which still sat in my desk.

Of course, the second day of its use the Red Ball of Power was stolen by some student in my sixth period as they were leaving the room (I had absently left it on the podium). I knew that it disappeared at the close of sixth period, though, so I found a few of my sixth-period ruffians in the halls and told them to spread the word that if anyone "finds the ball in the hallway" they may assist its anonymous reappearance into my room within 24 hours and no penalties would follow for anybody; and with whatever fire I could project into my eyes I threatened nameless but assuredly awful penalties for the entire sixth period if it failed to reappear in such time. It was back the next day, and I've kept it closer since. The novelty has worn off and some students have become annoyed at the ball, and some days its effect wanes, perhaps as I become less strict with it. It has helped, however. There have been a few mis-throws that have elicited giggles, which are scolded as false laughs at the not-in-fact-funny.

(Two immediate rules were that the ball cannot be passed from student to student, only teacher to student and student to teacher, and that it must immediately be returned upon request, never played with.)

Otherwise my plan has remained as it was this summer. I am considering dumping the second consequence (disciplinary assignments, usually essays), and going straight to detention. It's a pain in the ass to keep track of all the assignments, and many of my students have not been turning them in (I have their names, but haven't had the time to follow up on them yet, despite threats that I still expect to act on). And I was surprised to find that I have appreciated -- not liked, exactly, but appreciated -- my time with kids serving detention. I will be there grading papers anyway, and having a student or two in the room doing work, helping clean, or sitting quietly is often more agreeable to me than sitting alone grading papers for hours, and I find that I actually like them better: so many of my students who are constant trouble in a large group become perfectly courteous in a very small one, and at the end of the day it renews my faith a bit to see my troublesome ones behaving themselves.

That said, I've also given out quite a bit of detention that remains to be served. I haven't lost track of it, I'm proud to say, but unfortunately I haven't been organized enough to remind students to show up under threat of being "written up." I will though. Just after all this other stuff.

In the Absence of Books

2005-08-28T11:00:00.000-06:00

The literacy level of my students, as I was repeatedly warned, is low. Some of them can hardly read, in fact. I teach one class of honors students (and it was only on the morning of the first day of school that I learned I would teach this class), and in so many ways they are wonderful; but even they, who are able to read, overwhelmingly do not. I had all of my students fill out a questionnaire on the first day, and one of the questions asked the title of their favorite book. I plan to post some statistics gathered from those forms later; for now I will say that hardly anybody answered that question.

We have Prentice Hall Literature textbooks, which contain a diverse assortment of short texts and excerpts from longer texts, and, in the back, the complete text of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. We just got copies in my classroom, and we haven't started using them yet. I am hopeful though I am afraid that most of the texts in the book will be beyond the capabilities of many of my students.

But my honors class! From the moment I learned that I would have an honors class I was determined, absolutely determined, to have them read books, actual books -- novels and poetry that are not subject to the indignity of presentation as units in a textbook. I inherited a classroom with twenty-some copies of Paradise Lost, apparently never touched. It is an exciting thing to inherit, and I don't know why they were purchased if not to be read. I worry that even the honors students will have such a difficult time with it that they will hate it, so though I am excited to have the book I want to wait until the second semester and gauge ability before issuing copies.

I believed that I needed to find out what books we have available to us, and to choose from among them the book with which we will start. I believed that most high schools had some sort of book room, filled with student copies of the typical high school fare. I learned that we don't have such a room at North Panola, that we have a cabinet in the library. It was not an encouraging development, but I went to the library to see the cabinet.

First, the cabinet is filled with junk: plastic bags and fabric and styrofoam and gauze and bulletin-board border and so on. The books are piled on top of and behind each other so that it takes some time to unload enough of the shelves to see what they hold. And almost every book there is there in between six and twelve copies.

What the hell do you do with ten copies of The Catcher in the Rye? So far are we from having enough copies of a book to issue to every sophomore, we hardly have any books in sufficient numbers to issue one to every member of one class period. I guess they just don't ordinarily read books here.

Now, one of my internal conflicts has been between literature whose subject more immediately grabs particular students and literature that is somewhat less immediately accessible to them but which is deep enough and rich enough and subtle enough to warrant exposure despite the inherent challenges. Where is the balance between Milton and Shakespeare on the one hand and J.D. Salinger and Langston Hughes on the other? My students all know a bit about Langston Hughes. What little experience they have of Shakespeare is recalled as unpleasant.

Surely these kids who do not read need to be seduced to reading, and such seduction is far harder to effect with those allegedly dead white men. But I am nagged by a sense that for all the goodness of many 20th century writers, a Homer or a Shakespeare is such a rare and extraordinary appearance, and what a shame to educate so shallowly within the limits of one century. The conflict is eased somewhat by the reality of illiteracy here, and by the resultant awareness that my choices are sharply limited with most of my students. But, again, the honors class! How do I seduce them to the side of literature without doing them the injustice of entirely avoiding that vast and great literature incidentally produced by the dead white male?

I decided that we ought to start with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Ellison is an African-American writer from the last hundred years writing about African-Americans in the last hundred years. So maybe there's fertile soil for literary seduction. And it's also, by my judgment, a richer and subtler and more challenging book than most on the typical high school canon. And our book cabinet has nineteen hardly touched copies. Unfortunately I have twenty-one honors students, and my own copy is probably lost in California somewhere. So I call the Sardis Public Library. It's a public library in a black-majority town; surely they'll have half a dozen copies of Ellison. But it turns out they have one copy. Happily, they can get one more from the Batesville library, ten miles south. So my students are taken care of. I still need one for myself.

I learn that there is a bookstore in Batesville. Apart from the adjacent Christian bookstore, it's the only bookstore in Panola County. It's in a small strip mall along with clothing outlets and craft stores, like one would find anywhere in suburban America. It looks very clean and sterile, like a large chain. Surely they have a copy or two. But no. They seem never to have heard of it. So I drive to the next nearest bookstore (actually among the finest bookstores I've ever visited, Square Books), which is all the way back in Oxford. Of course they have it there, in that great town. They have it in abundance.

I live in the United States of America, in a part with a black majority, and I need to drive seventy miles round-trip to buy the nearest single copy of Ellison.

(As an aside: it costs almost $30 to fill the tank on my Ford Escort.)

Mingling Race into Tension

2005-08-28T09:46:00.000-06:00

The Mississippi Teacher Corps summer training included some warnings about confrontations with students and physically threatening situations, all of them as I recall centered in the classroom; and there was surprisingly little talk of the effect on these situations or on the classroom environment of being, in most cases, the only white person (or Asian person, or. . .) in the room.

In these first three weeks I have generally felt no substantial effect of my whiteness in the classroom. A few students have made small jokes about whiteness or blackness, but I have always had the impression that they would have been hardly less likely to make them with a black teacher. Almost all of my classes have at some point become briefly distracted by questions of my race, students abruptly changing the subject from, say, transitive and intransitive verbs, to asking bluntly, "What race are you?" or sometimes something more subtle to the same effect. One class insisted that I didn't look American, and one student in it continually asserts that I must be from Paris (still further, that I look like a magician from Paris -- what her experience could be of Parisian magicians in rural Mississippi I am not able to guess). Many students have squared me away as Spanish, and at least as many as "Middle Eastern," which they most often interpret, quite simply, as "Iraqi." (I have been so questioned elsewhere, and the usual identifications are Spanish and Jewish -- both at least somewhat correct -- and I suppose my students might be making the same identifications from within a more limited framework.) I have usually not felt that my students perceived the racial segregation and politics here so acutely as I have, or at least that they were so unsurprised by them that they seemed not to notice anymore.

Friday night was the first football game, and all faculty were "on duty" and assigned to posts. I was standing for the whole game at the gate on the visiting team's end. The team we played had maybe one or two black players, and one black cheerleader; all others were white. Virtually everyone whose ticket I took was white. The other side of the field was all black. I knew that these games happen, but actually seeing a football team of whites lined up against a football team of blacks, their families and friends cheering on their respective sides of the field -- and two separate gates for their entry! ... somehow my knowledge that it happens left me no less surprised to see that it actually does. Maybe it happens everywhere to one degree or another. It was actually my first high school football game.

I was not sure if the faculty was supposed to stay for the whole game, and there was nobody nearby for me to ask, so I stayed. When the game ended and I began the walk to the other side of the field, toward the school and the parking lot and my car, I saw few teachers, and assumed most had left toward the end of the game. Many of my students saw me and said hello, wished me a good weekend. One commented that I must be tired. (It was 10:30pm, and I had been on campus since 6:45am; I was still wearing a tie; and though nobody else knew it, because of the chance load of my schedule that day I hadn't even eaten anything since dinner the previous night.)

As I got to the front parking lot the crowd was a bit rowdier. I noticed for the first time since I've been in Mississippi that I was the only white person. I put the thought out of my mind, taking it to be an unseemly one. It was dark, and I thought I heard someone shouting, "Mr. Pollack," as several of my students had just done on the other side of the building before friendly exchanges of greetings. I turned in the direction of the call, and saw a group of maybe four or six teenagers, but they weren't looking toward me and I thought I might have imagined my name. I reached my car, unlocked it, and opened the door, and heard from the same direction my name again, this time followed with, "Get your white ass outta here," and "Go back to Iraq." I shook my head and continued into my car, put on my seat belt, turned the key, and put it in reverse. After backing out of my space and turning the wheel, as I was shifting into drive but before the gear was engaged, I see these kids running up behind my car, covering their faces with hats and t-shirts. I hesitate before pulling forward and they start banging on the back of my car. I begin to pull forward and they run away laughing.

It occurs to me that banging on the back of somebody's car could be quite light-hearted, though obscuring one's face as one does it makes the act rather more threatening. I am sure these kids were in my fifth or sixth period class, or perhaps a few from each, though I'm not sure who they were. I am somewhat sure, maybe 80% sure, that I know who one of them was, the one who seemed to be the ring-leader, but I am not sure enough.

There were cops just around the corner. I was probably not ever in actual danger. Nevertheless, I'm not sure how to feel about the encounter. At the time I wanted nothing else but to eat something and go to sleep, and would entertain thoughts of no other action. And maybe in a dark and crowded parking lot after a football game it is plainly and always foolish to engage half a dozen apparently hostile people, even if their hostility might not be wholly serious. But I am bothered with the idea that their overtly aggressive gesture was met in their minds with a hasty retreat, that from their view they forced an authority to submit, that they won dominance, and that discipline problems they have already presented to me might now become worse.

Choctaw Ridge

2005-08-28T09:34:00.000-06:00

My sitemeter logs, among other things, "referrals," which are the sites from which visitors to this blog clicked links to arrive here; and it reveals a steady flow of readers who find this blog by doing websearches on "Choctaw Ridge" or "Where is Choctaw Ridge" or similar variations, no doubt curious about the Bobbie Gentry song.

Choctaw Ridge doesn't turn up on many sites apart from those with Gentry lyrics. It seems to be an archaic description.

Clarksdale Blues Festival and First Weekend Back in Oxford

2005-08-27T15:43:00.000-06:00

A couple of weekends ago Evan and I went to the Blues festival in Clarksdale. I hesitated before going, concerned that I had too much work to do, but was very pleased when I got there.

We saw Honeyboy Edwards, the 90-year-old bluesman who knew Robert Johnson and was present when he died. (I am told that it is his account of Johnson's death that is widely considered most credible.) He sounded quite like I would have imagined, playing acoustic Blues as a man who played it when all Blues was acoustic.

Then last weekend we all reunited for the first time in Oxford. And what a relief, to decompress with my peers who are experiencing similar trials. Or even to chat over drinks with people my age, somewhat hip and somewhat liberal and somewhat well-educated. It sounds ugly and provincial, maybe (if it isn't too backwards a use of provincial), and I do not mean it to be derogotary to anyone outside of that description, but what a relief it was, ugly relief or not.

Obscene/Tasteless

2005-08-16T19:23:00.000-06:00

Obscene/Tasteless
From Robert Pollack at flickr.com.

My blog cannot be accessed from North Panola High School because the State of Mississippi deems it obscene/tasteless.

(Regrettably this is not a special honor: everything hosted on blogspot.com is blocked; but I like the illusion.)

The Subjective Objective

2005-07-24T22:53:00.000-06:00

Academic evaluation is a bitch. The problem of grades, of what to grade and how to grade it, is the permanent affliction of academia. Even in a class whose subject presents clear problems with clear solutions, where the ability to demonstrate material competence is unproblematic, the decision an educator or an institution makes of what exactly to evaluate and how exactly to evaluate it introduces the prejudice of arbitrary decisions and subjectivity. And how much greater, how much clearer is the problem in classes of greater artfulness, of greater creativity and creation, of greater reflection. Some radical institutions have tried to do away with grading entirely; my own little college, by recording grades unceremoniously into a computer, yields to the artificial but more-or-less efficacious necessities of admission to other institutions, to demands for documents to prove and to benchmark ineloquently and without precision; but those grades are not reported to students, who must fill out a form to view them, and the primary evaluations are presented to students orally by their teachers.

I did not come to Mississippi to attend graduate school; I came to teach, to be helpful, to know the South. I am nevertheless enrolled in the School of Education at the University of Mississippi, and my performance in a curriculum culminating in a master's degree must, of course, be evaluated. I do not envy the School of Education, its dean or its teachers, for this task. Nevertheless, their performance at this task is my single greatest annoyance and complaint with the program I have entered (my not being here primarily for the degree precludes bitterness, but not annoyance). I do not know whether it is endemic to the department or peculiar to the program, but in either case I am faced with a blind, unwavering, pig-headed fidelity to the notion of objectivity, which here, of course, is a joke.

I do not mean to deny the possibility of objectivity in the abstract, or to entertain absurdities about teaching being impossible to evaluate. Of course there are good teachers and bad teachers, great ones and lousy ones, and some significant possibility for rather broad agreement about which are which. But assigning them scores on a 100-point scale with a 20-point rubric and expecting that a 93 presents a real and substantial difference from an 88, or even a 76, is a particular kind of lunacy, and it misunderstands, I think, something very basic about what it wants to do.

I made my peace with subjective grading a long time ago. Sure, it stinks. All right. And that's why unthinking or desperate educators invented the formulaic five-paragraph essay (or, hell, the formalized definition of the paragraph itself), which is not more expressive or beautiful (usually less, in fact) but is more easily and consistently evaluated, and which thereby makes young people not into students of the Liberal Arts or of the humane or of themselves or even of their world, but into students of standardized tests; and which is perhaps why (or is a contributing reason that) education has almost entirely ceased to be education, becoming instead training for evaluations of arbitrary or somewhat arbitrary content memorization, leading eventually to different levels of job training. The monomaniacal pursuit of objective evaluation is destructive of real education. Objectively evaluatable pursuits, or at least those pursuits that are easily and consistently objectively evaluatable, are usually the least interesting, the least insightful, the least enlightening, the least lovely, the least worthwhile, and certainly the least worthy of the dignity of the name "education." And all those minutes spent studying the test are minutes wasted, minutes spent learning how to be evaluated, learning how to fill out the form (be it a multiple-choice bubble form or a five-paragraph essay form or an STAI lesson plan form), learning what will be evaluated and how; those minutes remind the student that he is studying for a score, that he is playing a game, and that the goal is not self-cultivation but winning; they pervert the education of the students who are good at this empty game, and they discourage the students who are bad at it from pursuing education at all.

Performance in education, the question of whether someone is becoming more educated, is fundamentally subjective, and is only answerable subjectively. Even objective evaluations of a student's ability to solve mathematical problems and perform drills, while themselves objective, reflect implicit subjective decisions about relative importance and do not necessarily correlate with education (how many students who can perform calculus drills all day really understand or appreciate the calculus?). Its being subjective does not mean that it is not real, or that it is not absolute, or that it is not knowable or even evaluatable. But any "objective" system of evaluation, any contrivance that allows very precise rather than very broad gradations and that allows those gradations the conceit of reflecting anything real, is a ruse.

So how do you evaluate and assign grades to student-teachers? I don't know. You do it subjectively, though, however you do it; and the extent to which you pretend to do it objectively is the extent to which you are evaluating nothing, or are evaluating the ability to learn and adjust to the system of evaluation.

There is a manifest absurdity in a rubric that assigns the same weight to the important and fundamentally subjective "classroom management" and to, say, writing the date on the board. Some people have defended the absurdity by calling the latter "free points," but I do not see how they can defend the existence of "free points" while also maintaining the conceit of objectively evaluating something real. There should be no "free points" in any evaluation system at all; least of all should they exist in a system that objectively evaluates something real. What the "free points" serve to do is minimize the influence of the fundamentally subjective: there's nothing subjective about writing the date on the board, so you can't contest that; now the fundamentally subjective "classroom management" has a smaller influence on your overall grade. If we bloat the rubric with arbitrary and mostly meaningless requirements, we effect the air of an intricate and calculated system while minimizing the role of subjective judgment (which, of course, is the only judgment, since judgment requires a subject-judge).

But the subjective is still in there, and the numerousness of graded items encourages a kind of carelessness in the precision of each: with 20 five-point items less care is allowed to each small distinction than would be given on rubric of only three or five items. This teacher's classroom management was good, it presents no obvious suggestions for improvement, but is it worth four points or five? With nineteen similar questions I reflect less on the subtlety than I would if there were fewer, and the evaluation risks becoming more, not less, haphazard. And how likely is it that a given evaluator, for no conscious fault of her own, would reach more readily for fives when evaluating women, fours when evaluating men? Or vice versa? Or when evaluating pretty or plain teachers, or tall or short ones? Such unconscious prejudice is inescapable, surely, but is it more likely when evaluations are performed simply on simple (though subjective) criteria, or when they are complex on very numerous criteria?

Having seen many of my colleagues teach, and having heard some talk of grades, I find no consistent and substantial correlation between evaluation and quality of teaching, and I suspect that while some reflection of our teaching does exist in our grades, it exists primarily in those very subjective parts that make the formulators of the system so uncomfortable; and unfortunately the greater part of the grade reflects our quickness in adapting to the grading system.

Sunflower County Freedom Project

2005-07-24T21:18:00.000-06:00

A few years ago an alumnus of Teach for America founded the Sunflower County Freedom Project, "an independent non-profit organization dedicated to educational excellence and leadership development in Sunflower County, Mississippi" (not to be confused with the similarly-named Republican PAC). For an annual tuition of $300 the youth of this poor Delta county receive regular academic tutoring, weekend classes, a network of mentors, martial arts training, summer courses at the University of Mississippi, educational travel, and membership in a mutually supportive community of learning. Last week a group of three participants in the program spoke to me and other members of the Mississippi Teacher Corps, and the same evening performed an original play on the life of Delta civil rights activist Fanny Lou Hamer.

My first awareness of their program left me suspicious of it: they wear matching shirts, they tend to speak in a shared jargon (the older ones fluent and rapid in it, the younger ones tending toward downward gazing and stutters), they ride together in marked vans and try to recruit members and solicit donations. Even after a somewhat deeper acquaintance they continue to evoke for me at least the likeness of Evangelical youth groups, or itinerant religious cults. The older ones, or the older ones who are put forward as representatives, have the sort of nimble delivery and glib certainty of self and purpose that I associate most with Mormon missionaries.

But aren't they, after all, an after-school program? And who wouldn't support an after-school program? As such a small program in such a poor region, with no tax-payer support, they do need to solicit donations. And shouldn't they try recruiting members? To share the benefits of intellectual and physical cultivation? Won't I, as a teacher, be similarly attempting to recruit members to the world of thoughtful and reflective living? But the suspicion remains, perhaps for fault of its depth in me. Is it totally superficial, a learned reaction to evangelizing? But again, as a teacher am I not a kind of evangelical? Or for that matter as a believer in the importance of the Liberal Arts?

Their afternoon presentation left me no less ambivalent. We asked them if they felt they had a positive influence on their peers outside of the program, or if they were teased, or what their friends thought of their participation. Their answers were typically strong and self-affirming though as trite and rehearsed as one might expect from adolescents ("I don't care what anybody else thinks, they're just jealous," etc.), but the most telling insight was that they tend not to have any friends outside of the program. And we would expect them not to, wouldn't we? They cultivate their minds and bodies while their peers outside of the program are the vulgar, the plebian, the Philistine, the youths whose pregnancy rates and incarceration rates and dropout rates are among the highest in the nation and who in a few weeks will fill my classroom and those of my MTC and TFA colleagues. They can all be recruited, of course, but without a shared dedication to learning and self-improvement, is it fair to expect deep bonds? Surely such separation from the world is a commonplace for religions and to be fair is commonplace for all of us and our little societies and cultures.

The program seems to focus heavily on admission to college, and one of its stated goals is that its participants will go to the college of their choice on scholarship. And I wonder how many of the participants would not otherwise go to college, or would go only with much greater struggle. The Sunflower County Freedom Project deserves praise for this assistance. I was uncomfortable, though, with how much the kids in their program talked about college, and with the hallowed tones they used when talking about it. Maybe the program is responsible for neither, and they spoke only as all eager teenagers do, but I wondered how deep a sense of completion these kids would feel upon arrival at the college of their choice, and what they would do after that sense dissipated. Would they be done? Done with anything? I do not aim to demean higher education, or the achievement it is to convince kids in the Delta to invest themselves in it as a personal goal, but can it perhaps be too deeply revered? Too heavily emphasized? I might not have thought so, and maybe I was prejudiced by my impression of evangelical religiosity, but they spoke of college in tones that sounded to me like they were talking about the sweet hereafter. Can't the emphasis be on education for its own sake rather than education in order to go to college on scholarship and escape the Delta? Wouldn't it be less artificial, less a prelude to anticlimax, to emphasize living a decent and humane and reflective life, whether in the Delta, at college, or doing whatever one decides to do and wherever one decides to do it? Maybe, as I said, the extraordinary focus on college was more the ordinary focus of kids about to start their applications, and not the focus of the program. And even if it is the focus of the program, maybe getting Delta kids into college is noble enough a goal.

I am returned to a question I keep finding in Mississippi: what is success for the Delta? I am told that the population in many parts is shrinking though the birth rate is very high. Organizations and governments continue to throw money into it and the people who benefit usually move out of it. Will the final success of the Delta be its becoming empty? The three Freedom Project kids who spoke to us said that they wanted to attend college outside of Mississippi. I asked them whether they thought they'd ever return to the Delta and the nearest answer to "yes" came from one who said he might return for a while, and that even if he didn't return he would like to contribute money to programs like the Sunflower County Freedom Project. So is the program contributing to the Delta by helping to empty it? Is it a training station for the world outside of the Delta, which begins with social separation and ends with university admissions?

It must be said that the program does instill participants with a knowledge and respect for the civil rights movement and for the cultural contributions of the Delta, maybe with a pride in the Delta and sentimentality for it and its history. So at least they will love the place while they try to escape from it.

The evening performance was very impressive to me. The kids told us about their studies, they demonstrated Tae Kwon Do, they recited poetry from memory and performed a play. There was nothing sinister in it. Maybe the program is something like a religion, and my feelings reflect the likeness: it gives them a place to go and an idea to center themselves; maybe it allows them to realize their smallness and even to acknowledge it ceremonially, and thereby to participate in bigness; it cultivates them and ennobles them; and maybe it also engages in some sort of foolishness, creates some dogma or unrealistic expectations. I am not converted, but there is surely some beauty in it. I liked the kids and was impressed by them, and saw the good the program has given them, and I hope they all succeed and that they either escape the Delta without regret or return to it with determination. I did buy their tee-shirt.

Another Autoanalysis, by Video

2005-07-19T02:08:00.000-06:00

I don't know if this entry was due at midnight or by morning, but I hope for the latter since I slept all day (after traveling all weekend) and am now doing the day's work in the small hours.

So I watched a second videotaped lesson, this one delivered to my colleagues and a "veteran teacher" rather than real students, since real students in most of the Northern Hemisphere are on break. My first observation, again, is of the sound of my voice, or of my uncomfortable reaction to the sound of my voice. That reaction is tempered this time by a greater expectation of it, and by the several compliments I've received about my voice in the elapsed time (and even, I suppose, the memories those compliments stimulated of similar compliments in the past). But since these compliments usually follow my reading aloud of some poem or poetic prose, I am inclined to believe that they specifically target something of my delivery, of pacing and emphasis and so forth, and do not speak to what is so offensive to my own ear: namely, the timbre itself, the very sound my tongue and throat interact to produce. It is perhaps not the most helpful self-criticism, since I can think of no reasonable remedy (if you consider surgery or thousands of cigarettes unreasonable). It does, at least, invite me to reflect on the strange chasm that separates the ego from the world, or (what I take to be) myself from my students.

I see that I walk around a lot, no doubt at the urging of so many evaluators, but I do it with neither elegance nor grace, not even with clarity of purpose. I am not convinced - not deeply, anyway - of the certainty of value in aimless pacing, and in fact received compliments precisely for my not doing that, for being comfortable where I stood, while so many of my colleagues paced like cats in cages. Nevertheless, it's an easy and inoffensive criticism, so almost every evaluator seems to make it of almost every evaluated, and here I can make it of myself since my walking was ineffective. On the tape I appeared to walk without aim, without gravity. It does seem to me, however many or few of our instructors would agree, that being anchored authoritatively is preferable to weightless, directionless floating, which is how we uninitiated act on exhortations to "walk around the room." So I will continue to walk, but I will aim to do it with purpose, to know where I am standing and how I will go, and not to move because I'm afraid of motionlessness (perhaps even standing still should be a kind of motion). Again, this observation implies that teachers are performers, and that their motions should be the motions of performers, easy but calculated, bearing weight but not rigidity.

I talk to the board, for which reason I have since employed an overhead projector. It makes a difference immediately, and I think I handle it well.

I have spoken to many of my peers about their experiences after watching themselves on tape, and I have read many of their blogs (including those for whose live performances I was present) and I've lost some faith in the fidelity of the impartial camera machine. Maybe it does have a kind of perspective after all, with which it prejudices all objects impartially with ugliness. Or is it we who project the ugliness onto recordings of ourselves though not onto ourselves the rest of the time? Or is it both?: the machine makes almost perfect but slightly uglier likenesses, which for the subtlety of their perversion disturb us so much more, like robots that are recognizably inhuman but human enough to be creepy.

Whatever the images of things do to the things themselves, I learned something worthwhile from the experience of them, mostly by the shock of the disparity (and the subsequent sustained awareness of the disparity). I am not optimistic that there is much more to glean from the tapes, however, since I no longer trust that they faithfully represent the experience of being in the room (have VHS tapes ever faithfully represented any experience?), and thankfully I will not be teaching students by videocassette.

Suggested Addition to Lists of What the New (Male) Teacher Should Know

2005-07-07T09:59:00.000-06:00

The tie goes outside the seat-belt.

Reflections on Student Teaching

2005-07-05T04:55:00.000-06:00

My impression of student teaching this last month is rather different than Jess's, though not wholly different (and I suspect that her concern for our morale is as unnecessary in the other two cases as it is in mine).

There is the problem, of course, of not being the real teacher. We know it and the kids know it and the real teacher knows it, and even when the real teacher is only very slightly real-er, the magnitude of the difference is immaterial. The distinction is binary: real teacher, not real teacher.

We were inclined to be friendlier with the kids than we might otherwise be, certainly less formal. Discipline tended to be more relaxed as consistency was so much more difficult. I felt more like a special tutor than a teacher, especially when we broke into small groups, though that time was clearly the most beneficial for the kids, and clearly made the best use of us (it was the least like what we'll do in the fall).

The problem of summer school, which I think must be universally acknowledged, is that these kids are kept in the same room with the same subject and the same group for eight hours a day. Our room didn't have windows. It was always either too hot or too cold, and we could not control the air conditioning. They had a 20-minute lunch and a 7-minute break. Summer school is a punishment for the kids who failed; it is not an opportunity to do again what was done too poorly during the academic year.

The experience was good exposure to the problems of teaching (particularly teaching to a combined group of high-, low-, and non-achievers), and of some particular problems of teaching English in a place like where I will be teaching it (where the kids all have impeccable handwriting but many can barely read). It was good to build confidence at standing before a group. It was good to have first-time jitters so that entering a class in the fall will present only something-after-first-time jitters.

I learned about teaching, and about kids, and about these kids, and about people, from specific instances of specific events, like what Jess is talking about when she says that the teacher "humiliated" a student (in that teacher's defense, she was shaken, and frustrated, and upset, and didn't know what to do, and asked us afterward what we thought about it, and whether we thought she did the right thing). What the teacher did was ask a student to leave the class or to apologize, which might have been a mistake, and which public confrontation is certainly not the pedagogical fashion according to our books and instruction. But it was, better or worse, a gripping and troubling and touching and deeply illustrative drama. The student would not apologize, and kept repeating in slow and extended syllables "that's hard, that's hard" as he angrily packed his things to leave, understanding that he would be leaving summer school and that he would fail and that since he was going to be a senior and would be lacking a required class he might not graduate high school on time or at all. But losing in a confrontation was that expensive to him. And the class erupted into pleas for him to apologize, just apologize, there are only two days left, just apologize. They all seemed to care very genuinely. They knew he was simmering and wanted him to cool down, not to throw anything away in a huff. And he asked if he could apologize after class rather than apologizing in front of everyone, which was an incredible sort of bargaining I thought, because he was willing to apologize and even for everyone to know that he apologized, but he thought it so much better if he didn't have to do it just then, and if they didn't all have to see it. I don't think the teacher had time to consider the offer before he relented and blurted out, "Imsorry" with his hands in the air, resigned, and she was eager to move on, somewhat uncomfortable. She took him aside later to talk to him privately, which is maybe where the whole exchange should have occurred, but I'm not convinced that it would have been easy to manage that without kicking somebody out of class.

Whatever the Perfect Teacher would have done, I'm glad to have seen all of this. I was moved by it, and saw more deeply.

Reluctant Disciplinarian

2005-07-05T03:53:00.000-06:00

Complaints at the assignment of reading Gary Rubinstein's Reluctant Disciplinarian cannot be very bitter, since 140 (or so) pages of moderately large font, ample margins, and abundant cartoons make a short and simple read. And as with most pursuits, it rewards in proportion to the effort expended (which in this case is necessarily not very much).

I don't mean to say that this book is worthless (though I could conscience throwing it away). There just isn't much to it. I might lend it to someone who I thought might appreciate it, but I would not be disappointed if it were never returned. If I had some limited number of Ex Libris name plates that I stuck into the front covers of my books, this book - to paraphrase Elaine from Seinfeld - would not be plate-worthy. It has its moments of humor, and Rubinstein is a likeable guy, but the substance is thin and one gets the impression that it was padded to meet the requirements of publication.

Rubinstein and his friends who get voice at the end do have some suggestions and insights that I found worthwhile (though most of them are not unique to this book). I like, for instance, the rule that all student suggestions, criticisms, disputes, or arguments will be heard, but only after class or in a letter - which is democratic enough a principle to allow students a voice in their own governance, but which also maintains the teacher's authority in the classroom and discourages empty filibustering (and if it's worth staying after class or writing a letter, it's probably worth hearing). I was struck by his emphasis on the importance of meeting student expectations: that students like doing well on traditional tests, and that it can be a good idea, even if the tests aren't worth much by the teacher's reckoning, to allow every student some measure of "traditional" success in order to invest him/her in the proceedings of the class.

Rubinstein does a fine job illustrating successful characteristics that are otherwise easily attributable to teacherly or unteacherly personalities: act like you expect them to do what you say, he suggests, and allow them to do it. Don't make a student lose face by obeying, or allow him the opportunity to gain face by disobeying; keep the economics of "face" entirely out of the interaction. Tell a student to change his seat, for instance, like it weren't an ordeal and like you have no reason to expect any friction, and walk away.

I got the impression from his crises of identity and by his gesturing into the direction of advice on the subject that some sort of personality neutrality is prudent to cultivate. I'm not sure he ever quite pins this down, but he does seem to have some difficulty with every new persona he adopts. Maybe what he stumbles toward is a kind of neutrality; we're always a little different, I guess, with every different friend or group of friends, and are pressured into filling our expected role in each group, but this can be a liability in a classroom, especially where the new teacher develops an undesirable social role and consequently struggles to escape it. Don't let the natural social politicking stick you somewhere. Be personality-neutral. Be able to shift from one day to the next, or one class period to the next, as is beneficial.

I think the central insight of the book, whether or not it is plainly (or ever) stated, is that every interaction is teaching. Education, or at least learning, will happen, for better or worse, because of or despite our efforts. And maybe some of the most important learning is not in the lesson plan. The teacher's attitude teaches. The teacher's interest and focus express what is and is not important according to the standards of the society that the teacher represents. And it is central to the task of managing a classroom that this subtler form of teaching is understood by the teacher and wielded competently.

Self-Evaluation from Videotaped Lesson

2005-07-03T02:32:00.000-06:00

I am suspicious of the decency of anyone who is not made uncomfortable by watching himself on videotape. What sort of man must he be? Surely not man at all, but either god or monster. Watching the tape, my first suggestion to myself: liberate or destroy that creature who, residing in the back of my throat, so perverts the calm, even timbre of voice I myself hear carrying my words, into the nasal, nebbishy croaking heard by the camera, and presumably - horror! - by everyone else.

That there is a difference between these two voices perhaps presents a way into understanding this endeavor of video self-analysis and the proposed benefits I am to gain from it: the I whom I know (or presume to) and the more visible fellow who stands in his place for everyone else need not and probably don't coincide - apart from their saying the same words they need not overlap at all - and since high school students are as unlikely as anybody to extend themselves toward understanding me as God does, I ought to become acquainted with that uglier and more annoying fellow whom they will see every day in their classroom. I don't have to like him but we will be teaching together, so we may as well cooperate. Or maybe my aim is to kill him, or one of us anyway, so that I and all others know the same unmistakable me.

Can it be for anything more than vanity, after all, that I extend to the one the dignity of believing it real? Maybe it is this realization that makes watching the video so uncomfortable: the cold, mechanical impartiality of the camera lends its vision credibility: what it sees seems more likely real, and what I perceive in its absence more likely the illusion. It is some consolation, at least, that everybody is reporting similar discomfort. We're all dopes together. (And since nobody else seems so dopey to me, maybe the dopiness is a prejudice against oneself as much the previous illusion was a prejudice in one's own favor.)

I wonder if seasoned actors or dancers or gymnasts can become immune to this discomfort, as they develop an awareness of their physical persons - of body and expression and motion and gesture - that approximates seeing oneself always from the outside as well as from within. Insofar as they can become so immune, I wonder if a stiff teacher can become a better teacher - can become more present, forceful, and commanding - by studying dance, or acting, or gymnastics, or the like. Interacting as a teacher with one or a few people can be managed successfully, I think, by some degree of eloquence and social authority; but with thirty people? Interaction becomes a performance. To Socrates education is fundamentally erotic; it is not hard to say that with a crowd of students the teacher must seduce and provoke, first to command attention and then to incite it into worthwhile motions of its own. Very early in these weeks of reflecting on teaching I observed that teacher-like people are often actor-like people; now I wonder how many successful teachers like to dance.

Ms. Monroe's assignment asks for comment on two items, diplomatically opposing the first, "strengths," not with its natural opponent, but with, rather, "areas for improvement." It's sweet of her, but too gentle for my own self-analysis, and I hope she won't think me bold to replace it with a self-assignment: to cultivate a subtler perception of my presence, of body, motion, gesture. Not merely to "walk around the room" like so many books and speakers have already exhorted, but in walking to be more deeply aware of where I am and how I am there. To inhabit my body, and to be comfortable in it. To swat the clouds away from my head and more firmly anchor myself in my shoes. Maybe I should tighten my laces and loosen my necktie.

To go very deeply now into my "strengths" seems rather distasteful, both for breaking up the flow of thought and writing and also for being so unbecomingly congratulatory. But an assignment is an assignment (so I'll just keep it short): my principle strength in this (grammar) lesson was my command of the material, even giving the impression - if I may be so vain as to say so - of intimacy with the material far deeper than the circumstances allowed me to share, and of revealing it selectively according to some hidden plan or principle. I should admit that this impression was largely an illusion, but I think a well-crafted one.

Chappelle, Continued

2005-07-02T20:22:00.000-06:00

So it was Friday the 1st, the afternoon after the infamous Chappelle sighting on the Square, and el Molino and I were sitting in the cigar shop downtown, having a smoke and watching The Royal Tenenbaums on the shop's big screen. Then Dave Chappelle walks in.

Not many people had been in the cigar shop in the last hour, but of course a small crowd of men with cellphones enters a few paces behind Chappelle, suppressing grins and feigning some interest in cigars. The talk of the town himself walks swiftly and with purpose, is hawked some cigars by the proprietor, and walks out the door craning his head toward Dave Molina and myself to say something like, "Take it easy, fellas."

Not being the sort of men to defy such an injunction from the likes of Dave Chappelle, we took it easy for the remainder of the day.

Some hours later, at a few minutes from eight, as we walked toward the Ford Center to see the Oxford Shakespeare Festival present The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged), Dave notices Mr. Chappelle walking ahead of us. He enters the building with a pretty woman (his wife, I think), sees the show, and leaves swiftly at the intermission; the two return as the second half begins, however, so they were presumably just hiding out in their car. When the show ended the lady walked outside talking on her cellphone, and Chappelle remained in the building for reasons I do not know.

Celebrity Sighting

2005-07-01T00:09:00.000-06:00

They've been saying the new season of the Chappelle Show was post-poned because Chappelle was holding out for more money, and they've been saying it's been post-poned because Chappelle had a breakdown in South Africa and checked himself into a mental health clinic. But tonight he was apparently in Oxford, Mississippi, eating at the Old Venice Pizza Company. It was very few minutes before all of Oxford seemed to know, and before most over-heard conversations were about it.

There were even MTC witnesses.

"Cold Calling"

2005-06-29T01:32:00.000-06:00

We student-teachers were required to implement one of three prescribed strategies in our classroom teaching, and to report on its outcome and benefits. Of the three, two would most naturally span multiple days of class, which for many of us would require additional coordination since several teachers are allotted to each classroom and in most classrooms, thus, each teacher is (mostly) responsible for planning one or two days per week. Consequently, as a perusal of the blogs demonstrates, almost everyone chose the third, which is dubbed, perhaps strangely, "cold calling": each student's name is written on a card, and each student is called upon (for whatever they are called upon to do) when his card has come to the top of the stack.

I was familiar with this technique from my freshman mathematics tutorial at St. John's, when Mr. Black used it to determine which student would demonstrate which proposition at the board. The stack came to be called the Stack of Death, to which Mr. Black responded by rather uncreatively calling it the Stack of Life. I disliked the system because it made a grander production of what should have been (and what, in my other three years of mathematics tutorials, was) a simple and relatively low-pressure affair. What was ideally to be a somewhat open introduction and invitation to a conversation became a solo performance and an artificially heightened responsibility. Mr. Black's ambiguous grin as he read each card - was he happy to be reminded specifically of each student, of whom he was fond?, or was the reminder an occasion for sadistic glee? - unnecessarily increased the trauma of being expected to demonstrate successful memorization before a group. It was a symptom of this method that, between (infrequent) shufflings of the deck, computations of probability were discussed before each class, taking into account the number of remaining unknown cards, as well as the complexity, length, and conversation-worthiness of assigned propositions (which factors were taken to determine the odds of getting through x propositions in a given class, and thus through x cards from the top of the deck). On those mornings when Mr. Black began by shuffling the deck, one could see whose odds had been high or low by the looks of relief or joy around the room as the odds were again leveled.

That said, there is a great difference between drawing cards to determine who must lead the class through a three to forty minute mathematical demonstration and drawing cards to determine who gets to read aloud the next paragraph from "A Rose for Emily" (or whatever). Nevertheless, since virtually everybody seemed to be trying the Cold Call I thought it would be no harm and would increase the data in the pool if I tried a modified form of it: I drew cards before class, recording the results to a list; I called on students pseudo-randomly as they were ordered on the list, and they never knew about the cards.

So. The results, as one might expect, were not so very different from those of the unmodified form, or of any other more-or-less even-handed method of getting through all of the students. The benefit of their knowing about and seeing the cards is the perception that the teacher is removed from the decision, that they are chosen not by a man with prejudices but by the whimsy of the Fates - though of course this could be an illusion if the teacher were to stack the deck or to read names from cards where they were not in fact written. Leaving the cards (or dice, or whatever) at home after using them to make a list does eliminate the benefit of perceived randomness, and hyper-sensitive students or those unfavored by chance might still feel picked-on; but the grandiosity of drawing the card, the drama of it, and thus some of the pressure, might thus be relieved.

Other benefits, like a better guarantee of getting to every student, of an actual elimination of teacher bias, and of gaining such benefits without, say, going around the room in a circle so that students know when their turn will come and can disengage until then, are maintained.

Southern Competence, or, Stereotype Down

2005-06-24T19:09:00.000-06:00

I went to a very small college where most administrators could know most students by name, or at least recognize their faces, and maybe it was for this reason that - though the school is small enough that it can afford a greater degree of disorganization than larger schools - my interactions with the administration were seldom negative. And of course I've had to interact with many other administrators of various denominations throughout my life, with widely different levels of satisfaction and frustration. But today, here at Ole Miss, I had perhaps the most satisfying encounter with an administration official that I have ever had.

During my undergraduate career I took a few more loans than the ordinary amount, and several times during those years my debt was sold from one lender to another, so I now unfortunately have to manage student debt through four separate organizations. Now that I am enrolled at the University of Mississippi I need to defer my loan payments (no interest accrues during such a deferment, thank you Uncle Sam) but have been busy and rather uninterested in sorting through the information, walking to the registrar's office to learn the procedure here, and filling out forms to have proof of enrollment sent to four addresses. Today I located the building and paid a visit, with the idea of learning the procedure and perhaps picking up some forms, and filling out one of them with the address to my old college (the only pertinent address I knew without searching). This was my aim, I had no expectation of exceeding it, and I knew enough of administration to have been neither surprised nor overly disappointed if I should have been somehow thwarted from accomplishing even that.

I was welcomed in by the registrar - an exceedingly friendly woman - who asked to see my student ID and to be told my Social Security number. She entered the latter into her unholy people-tracking database, read to me (correctly) the names of my lenders, and sent me on my way. I was in her office for maybe one full minute, and I touched no form. Proof of registration will be sent everywhere it needs to go, she tells me.

Any horror at my presence in her powerful machine was mitigated completely by the surprise of great convenience and administrative competence. Thank you, registrar, and thank you, Big Brother!

Panola Map, Choctaw Ridge, and an Alleged Inscription

2005-06-23T21:26:00.000-06:00

Panola County
From Robert Pollack at flickr.com.

I was perhaps unreasonably pleased to find this map of Panola County printed in the Wirt books mentioned in my last post, and though I will not deny a map fetish, neither am I wholly without reason. First, a map of a place like Panola County is a rare bird. Sure enough the county appears on maps of the state of Mississippi (more or less as an intersection of I-55 and Highway 6, with a dot for Batesville), but the towns of Sardis, Como, Crenshaw, Courtland, and Pope, though they may perhaps appear as dots, surely are not indicated by perimeters comprising finite areas. Additionally, I am pleased by any map that clearly demarcates the Delta, whose boundaries are so unambiguous when they are crossed but which are nevertheless so ambiguous on maps. I have seen only one other map that so clearly indicates the region (stolen from npr.org).

And of course the quaint hand-drawn character of the map is reminescent of the maps of Middle Earth included in all of Tolkien's books, which maps were endlessly imitated by me and all other bookish but warm-blooded nine-year-old boys with good hardy souls in them; and the likeness surely activates some psychological trigger.

What's more, the map heightened my appreciation of a song. I did not know, before seeing this map, that Choctaw Ridge names the boundary separating the Delta from the Hills. The coldness of the (mother's?) lyric Nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge, in Bobbie Gentry's lovely song, "Ode to Billie Joe," now benefits from a suggestion of the historical antagonism between the Delta whites and the "Rednecks" of the Hills. Since it is in Panola County that the Tallahatchie River crosses Choctaw Ridge, I suppose the Tallahatchie Bridge central to the song is Panolian, and that the song's speaker and her family are having breakfast at home somewhere in the western third of the county.

On an entirely different note, a few pages before the map Wirt's Politics of Southern Equality begins with an inscription allegedly left by a Union soldier on the wall of a Mississippi home, where we are told it remains legible:

To the owner of this house -- Your case is a hard one and I pity you.

A Google search does not return any instances of the phrase. I wonder if the inscription is real, and if so where in Mississippi it is.

Compare & Contrast

2005-06-23T20:13:00.000-06:00

Compare & Contrast, I

Compare & Contrast, II
From Robert Pollack at flickr.com.

In August I will begin teaching at North Panola High School, where about 100% of the students are black and many are poor. Perhaps ten miles south of North Panola High is South Panola High, which is racially integrated (and a few times larger). The two buildings give rather different impressions, as you can see in the photographs. More are available here.

When I scanned the map of Mississippi counties with critical teacher shortages I noticed no county but Panola that was shaded on only one half. Though I could guess, I do not know why Panola County is divided into two school districts. I hope the two books Frederick Wirt wrote on the subject of race in Panola County (Politics of Southern Equality and We Ain't What We Was) will be informative.

Where You Stay, Who's Your Kin, and Some Related Thoughts

2005-06-15T20:58:00.000-06:00

As surely as I am not the first neither will I be the last to observe that many Mississippians, or at least the young ones in the poorer parts of this state, speak not of living in a place but of staying there. I do not know whether the difference is merely dialectical - and no more insightful than whether one says y'all or you guys - or if it reflects a real and substantial difference in one's understanding of home. I have been asked a few times already where I stay, and where I will stay in the fall, and from what I've heard this seems to be no trifling concern of students about their teachers.

Many of them seem also to be markedly curious about one's kin. I've been asked about my kin, and many of the students seem eager to probe when any hint of the subject surfaces in a classroom discussion. And I hear now from several (white) second-year teachers in (segregated schools in) the Delta that the arrival on campus of any white person elicits questions about their relation, "Is he you huuzbehn'?" and, "Is they you kin?" being both frequently cited examples.

One experienced teacher who some years ago was an MTC participant in the Delta mentioned to me the strangeness of realizing that these poor black kids pitied him, a privileged white outsider, for his disconnectedness in the community, for his not having any kin. And they were always trying to connect him, to integrate him into the social world of the Delta, to find his kin. Not to be so integrated, I suppose, is to be in a sort of exile, an unrooted, detached, floating resident; and it is a pitiable state.

Changing the subject, in order to return to it:

Hardly any of my eleventh-grade summer school students read at an eleventh-grade level. Most of them cannot read fluently. We have nevertheless been tied to a standard eleventh-grade literature book, and most of them struggle with it. A student who does not give the least damn about Ben Franklin or Edgar Allen Poe (and why would he?), and for whom reading long passages even of his own dialect would be an exertion, has a hell of a time engaging one of these texts, questioning it, being reflective about it, or, often, even remembering the beginning when he's reached the end. So I thought to respond to these difficulties by giving them short Biblical passages.

Firstly, the tradition of ancient Hebrew prose, and in particular the reticence of its style, is such that essentially whole and independent narratives that can fit on a single page are common, and that translations exist which are at once lovely and simple. And though their language is plain, the literature is often subtle, complex, and profound. And, best of all!, though I find that most of my students are not Biblically literate, they all seem to come with a deep reverence for the Bible. So I can give them a subtle and complex text, in relatively simple language and that fits on a single page (or at most one page front and back), that they can hold in front of them all at once and read and reread, and they are inclined to care about it.

Tomorrow we will try reading the Binding of Isaac. In another place I might worry about raising eyebrows sensitive to the church-state division, but here my only concern is the potential heresy in the unavoidable questioning of God's justice. I will try to focus more on the experience of Abraham, though. And if there's time we might also read, by way of irreligious comparison, the passage from book six of the Iliad in which Andromache pleads with Hektor not to go die at war, to think of the woman and infant that he will leave widow and orphan, and Hektor's refusal (again a father making a profound decision that concerns the future of his son).

Now, in this reflection on the Israelites I came to think again about the culture of the South, or of Mississippi, or of the Delta. And though it might be that I extrapolated a false rule from the vivid instance of William Faulkner, it occurred to me that the Biblical reverence in the South might seem to include a particular and special fondness for the Hebrew Bible (okay, I'll say it: the Old Testament). I was just reading Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream Speech" and was struck by his several references and allusions to Hebrew books with nary a Greek that I noticed (I think I would expect the opposite of a Christian civil rights activist in an overwhelmingly Christian nation - and I expect that in other writings he must have relied more on the Gospels and Paul), and I was thinking also of Dr. Mullins's anecdote about the principal and "good ol' boy" who was so pleased to receive in his school a Jewish teacher since he proclaimed himself a Biblical expert who was especially fond of the Old Testament.

I am not one to begin carelessly identifying causes and effects, but I wonder whether there is not at least some sort of resonance between this culture and the one seen in these particular books, what with the more vengeful God who punishes a people for their wickedness, and with the always held-out hope of eventual triumph over ones oppressors and enemies, with slavery and with exile, with a wandering people who so often stay in a place rather than really living there, and whose tribal culture places so much of their identity and role in their kin - so far as identifying themselves, and somewhat paradoxically even the converts, as the seed of the mythological "high father," Abraham.

I mean, am I wrong, or does the South really love the Old Testament? (And isn't the Newer one somewhat more palatable to the liberal softies up North?)

B.B. King Back in the Delta

2005-06-12T18:40:00.000-06:00

B.B. King in Indianola, Mississippi
From Robert Pollack, at flickr.com.

I drove down into the Delta on Friday and saw B.B. King's annual homecoming in Indianola. I missed the five-dollar advance tickets, and thus can say only that it was the best ten dollar concert I ever saw.

Iron & Wine was playing at some dive in Oxford, and I would have loved to see them, but B.B. King is B.B. King, and he's eighty years old this year, and diabetic, and playing in his Delta hometown for cheaper than I&W in Oxford. So the decision was made.

I drove down to Laura Manion's place in Indianola, taking the 55, and she had arrived there ahead of me with Ruth. The three of us went to a barbecue at the house of some other second-years in the MTC, and later walked in a big group the two or three blocks to the concert.

The show was great and B.B. seemed healthy and lively, though he spent the whole show in a chair, which he did not do some years ago. His band played for a while before the fireworks that were apparently to introduce the man himself. Upon his arrival they played several of the standards, and what I think was a version of Darlin' You Know I Love You changed to address Indianola by name. B.B. sought and received the participation of the audience in When Love Comes to Town, which he introduced as having been written for him by his friend Boe-no from U2.

Dozens of children crowded the area nearest the stage, and I learned that they were waiting for the dance competition which is held before the final song. At B.B.'s cue his people began to select children from the crowd. "I don't want all blacks," he announced plainly, "and I don't want all whites; I want some blacks and I want some whites and I want whatever other color there is." First they had a competition for kids between five and eight years old, and another for kids nine to thirteen. (One of his people suggested raising the limit to fifteen, and he said that fifteen-year-olds are a-dults as far as he's concerned.) He killed some time during the selection by asking the younger kids the age at which they thought young people ought to marry: answers ranged from thirteen to forty.

Each of the two competitions included five boys and five girls. The winner of each sex - chosen by audience applause - then competed against the winner of the other. Grand prize was ten dollars cash, second place was five, and everybody on stage got a buck. The faces of the younger children revealed some measure of awe at the prospect of receiving ten dollars.

He stopped the music once in order to lightly scold some of the kids in the audience who were booing one of the dancers. He had been on many stages, he told them, and he knew that booing could really tear a person down; if you don't like somebody, keep your mouth shut, but don't tear nobody down. The admonition was met by some applause from further back in the crowd.

The winner of the older girls competition was a skinny white girl who declared herself to be eleven but dressed rather older than that, I thought. Her dancing was, if you understand me, mature, and the audience laughed and cheered. A woman to my left was in hysterics, tears of laughter running down her face; she was covering her eyes with her hands and saying again and again that she couldn't believe it, that she couldn't believe she was dancing like that. I thought the woman must be the girl's mother, be I learned that she was the mother of the girl's friend. After the girl won, and left the stage, a child asked her where her mother was, and she said, "Not here!"

Kids
From Robert Pollack, at flickr.com.

Earlier in the show I was stunned at the sight of a boy ahead of me, almost immediately next to the stage, surely no farther than fifteen or twenty feet from B.B. King - and who was nevertheless playing a Gameboy. I later figured he must have come just for the dancing, and therefore had understandably to kill some time during all that music which had to be suffered first. Of course I stole a photo.

After the dancing and the last song B.B. threw some pins to the folks up front. I was busy with the camera but Laura dove for them and came up with one for me. (Thanks, Laura - and for the living room floor and the pancakes, too.)

B.B. King Pin
From Robert Pollack, at flickr.com.

After the show B.B. was going to play for the a-dults at Club Ebony, and I heard that it was to cost $50 at the door. The rough consensus among the MTC kids was that the price was too high, though it did occur to me that I would be paying a comparable amount to see him play in a pavilion back home. And that here it would not be a pavilion back home, but a tiny club - the tiny club where he got his start, they say - in Indianola, Mississippi. The show in the park didn't end until after midnight, though, and we were all tired. And I did just spend fifty dollars on a watch. And I was in an unfamiliar town. So.

Next year - supposing Mr. King is up to continuing the tradition as he approaches his eighty-first birthday - I will go to the Club Ebony show. If mountains be in my way, I shall move mountains. The invitation for company is hereby sent.

I returned to Oxford up the 49 to Clarksdale and then on the 6 from there. The drive was lovely and I took pictures from my car, which are now here. All of the Indianola and B.B. King pictures are here. I also took a few short videos of the concert (with the video feature of my digital camera, so their quality is mediocre) that can be made available to interested parties upon request.

New Watch

2005-06-07T18:53:00.000-06:00

New Watch
From Robert Pollack, at flickr.com.

I got a new watch. It was $55 in the Ole Miss bookstore. I think it has sufficient teacherliness.

Introductions and Intentions

2005-06-04T23:45:00.000-06:00

My name is Robert Pollack and I am a student and teacher with the Mississippi Teacher Corps, a program of the University of Mississippi. As a candidate for the master's degree I am being required to keep this blog, and I intend to maintain it beyond the requirements of the course.

So, why did I come to teach in Mississippi?

While at Saint John's College I planned to pursue graduate study - perhaps in classics or Semitics, or some other subject that would leave me plenty of time with old books and old languages - and probably a career in academia afterward. But I also wanted to spend some time elsewhere first, preferably somewhere far away, in a place I didn't know, with a different culture, and I hoped to be helpful there. In part, surely, this thinking followed from a simple itch to travel (which seems to be a chronic affliction), and an uncomfortable if oblique awareness of the bigness of the world and the smallness of what I know of it. And, though it be perhaps unbecomingly high-minded or idealistic, some of the early readings at Saint John's were present enough to me that I felt compelled to pursue virtue more actively and for its own sake, if perhaps only after the manner of all idealistic young people, in whatever vocabulary they fashion it. So to these ends I applied to be a volunteer in the Peace Corps (and, for my academic interests, I hoped to be placed in North Africa or the Middle East).

After being interviewed for a Peace Corps assignment that I was told would begin the following year, I travelled to Buenos Aires and lived there for some months, studying Spanish and my genealogy, and meeting members of my extended family. I needed only a medical screening upon my return to the States and I would be scheduled to depart again, I was told probably for Africa.

Then I had the surreal experience of being in Argentina for the 2004 US Presidential Election. It seemed that everyone in Buenos Aires, friend or acquaintance or cabbie, was deeply disappointed by the results of that election, and many of them wanted to talk to me about it. I found myself being a representative of the United States, being asked to explain it and apologize for it to people who were puzzled and upset. I wanted to defend the US, to explain with sympathy its overwhelming paradox, its cultures and its politics, its liberality and its conservatism, its pride and its fear. Sometime in those weeks and months I decided in spite of myself that, though I had lost no interest in the Peace Corps and would love to serve for that organization, for now I could do in my own country what I would otherwise have done elsewhere.

Several facts influenced my next decision: since no later than high school I have believed that I would like to try teaching; my mother is from Nashville, and only once when I was a small child have I visited the South, though it is such a large and important part of the history and culture of my own country, and, by means of my mother, such a large and important part of myself; however much I love cities and urban life, I have nevertheless always romanticized rural and small-town living; and through a friend at Saint John's I had heard about the Mississippi Teacher Corps, a program that many Johnnies have entered.

So I applied, and was accepted, and now write these words from the campus of Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. I am student-teaching English III every morning and taking classes in education every afternoon. In August I will begin to teach English, and I am told maybe math, at North Panola High School in Sardis, Mississippi (a town of two square miles and about two thousand people).

I have been here for a week, and will be here for two years.