What Happened to Teaching Literature?

“They’re not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they’re destined for great things, just like many of you, their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because, you see gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? – - Carpe – - hear it? – - Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.”  Robin Williams says this when he plays Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society.  This movie is why I became a literature teacher.

I was a literature teacher for only a couple of years, then NCLB came along.  Everyone was too worried about AYP to teach literature anymore.  Now, it’s all about teaching reading.  Don’t get me wrong!  I think everyone is now a better teacher because of NCLB and teaching reading.  However, we don’t have that same passion for teaching reading as we did for teaching literature.

I wanted to teach about Jerry attaining a form of independence from his mother in Doris Lessing’s “Through the Tunnel“, how Shylock is a tormented character, as well as a tormentor in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice“, and how the sheriff argues with Atticus about the prudence and ethics of holding Jem or Boo responsible in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

But, who can teach literature when it’s all about reading?  I feel in love with all of this in college. (I can’t even name one book I read before college. *gasp* Scandalous…I know!)  If I would have known things would have turned out this way, I don’t know if I would  have taken the path that I did.  That, in itself is sad.  What does that say about me? 

I do not have an answer.  I do not believe that this will ever change.  In a way, I am glad that I am not teaching in a classroom anymore.  At other times, I wish I was back in the classroom so I could use these stories to teach “reading”.

A Call to Overhaul

President Obama has said that the nation must overhaul its education system.  “It is time to give all Americans a complete and competitive education from the cradle up through a career,”  Obama said.  “We have accepted failure for too long – enough. America’s entire education system must once more be the envy of the world.”

Students need new and ever-changing skills.  They need 21st century literacy skills.  We must assess which of our current practices meets the challenges of the 21st century and turn promise into practice.  

Kylene Beers, Robert E. Probst, Linda Rief and many others have written a great book Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice.  This nothing less than a call for change. Students these days need different skills than they did even ten years ago. Times change.  We must change with them or we are doing our students and the future of our country a disservice.  Thomas Friedman hit on this is his best-seller, The World If Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.  (If you have not read this book, I highly recommend it.)  

But, this concept is a double-edged sword.  Schools must pass standardized assessments.  This leaves little time for new and needed skills.  What to do?  I don’t have the answer.  But, I can tell you that merit pay is not the answer.

When Obama was talking about overhauling the educational system in this country, he spoke of his support for merit-based pay for teachers.  Although I think teachers do deserve more money for what they do, a good number of them also need a swift kick in the butt out the door to a new career.  (Some are so lazy that they wouldn’t even make it at McDonald’s!)

I have a better idea.  Give every teacher a $10,000 or more raise….and take away tenure.  I am sure that I lost some of you on the last part.  

I’ve seen many good teachers become so lazy over the years.  I blame tenure.  Teachers seem to work so hard to get their years in before tenure and then some of them become slackers (for lack of a better word).  They show movies all of the time, don’t really bother to assess students, teach what they want to teach verses what they should be teaching and my all-time favorite, sit on their butts and play on their computers while the kids either teach themselves through worksheets or run amuck.  Tenure protects these teachers.  

If tenure was taken away, all teachers would work as hard as they could because they would not want to lose their job.  What other profession does such a thing?  Don’t get me wrong, I love my job security.  I work hard.  If they took away tenure, I would find some way to work even harder.

This is all just a thought.  Personally, I am against merit pay because of the underprivileged schools.  Those schools will never have a level playing field with schools where students have two parents and help their children with their homework.  There are many other factors to this as well but I will leave it at that for now.

So, what will the future hold?  I don’t know.  In the last page of O ( The Oprah Magazine) each month is called “What I Know For Sure”.  Since I can’t see into the future, I will tell you what I know for sure.  

I know that standardized assessments and NCLB (how it stands right now) is not the answer.  I know that giving teachers, who just happen to work in schools where all kids do well, merit pay is not the answer.  I know that we are not teaching our students what they need to know for the future.  I know that charter schools are not the answer.  I know that all teachers, no matter where or what they teach, should be giving each and every student the best education possible.  I know that all students deserve grace (providing what students need – not what they deserve, having a relationship when students even when they reject you, and having the courage to hold students accountable).  I hope that Obama looks at all schools when he is considering such change for our educational system. I know that all students in all schools deserve better.

Who Keeps the Dreams of the Dreamkeepers?

On our professional development day (Monday, February 16th), we were asked as a staff to jigsaw the book The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children by Glo Ladson-Billings.  The book is a little old and from 1994.  I read it years ago but didn’t remember much about it.  When I read about educating African-American students these days I tend to keep going back to Alfred Tatum.  But, I guess writing about this touchy subject was not as popular back then as it is today.  Glo Ladson-Billings must have been before her time.  I tried to use “the Google” and find out more about her.  I came up empty handed.

Ladson-Billings challenges the reader to envision intellectually rigorous and culturally relevant classrooms.  We must not be colorblind anymore.  We must be a culturally relevant teacher.  Why?  Well, we must be this way because quality education still remains to be an elusive dream for most African-American children.  This dates back to slavery and all the way up to almost present day.  If you don’t believe me, feel free to recall the Jim Crow laws for one.

The book by Ladson-Billings is a mixture of scholarship and storytelling and is every bit as relevant today as it was in 1994.  Eight exemplary teachers and their unique styles and methods are explored through the research done by Ladson-Billings.  One teacher is as hard-as-nails with her direct reading instruction while another teacher is as free flowing as a hippie.  They got the same results.  How could that be possible?  It had nothing to do with the curriculum.  It’s how you treat students and what you expect out of them that makes the difference.  If you assume (which you all know happens when we assume) that you will have lazy students, that’s what you will get!  You have to set the bar high and teach them to be the best they can be.  Do we really want to have a bunch of idiots in our communities in the future?  I sure hope not!  

I’m sure we’ve all had that one student who we have tried everything with and we finally throw in the towel and think, “Fine.  Let them flunk.  I don’t care.”  Deep down we know that’s not what we want.  We put our hearts and souls (and even our pocketbooks) into students and we are so hurt when we get nothing in return. How do we create more teachers who won’t throw in the towel?  How do we get them to care?  How do we get them to be a dreamkeeper of those students’ dreams?

All students need and deserve exemplary teachers.  This does not always happen.  I have been in the same school for nine years now and I can think of dozens of teachers who did not and still don’t make any attempt to connect to students who were not the same shade of white as them.  How can you not want to improve the lives of all children?  How is it possible to have human beings in our country walking around still to this day not willing to help students make connections with their communities, nation and globally?  Why can’t we act as a family in the classroom instead of a cattle herder?  

With our new President in office, I hope we can blur the lines even more while respecting and celebrating one another’s cultures.  I must say that I do fear for those who still will not accept that there isn’t one superior race over another.  I hurt for the children that they are teaching and the people they must encounter.   

I recently went on a trip and was criticized for having a People magazine with Obama on the cover.  I heard the “n-word” and other racist comments.  I would like to say that I wasn’t raised that way….but I can’t.  I am my own person with my own values and beliefs and no, I will not be moving to Canada just because our President isn’t white!  I am 32 and hate confrontation.  This, however, was worth confronting.  I kept my cool but had a hard time not telling people what bigots they were and will always be with that attitude.  What if they were the ones who were not white?  What if they were the ones who were sent to the office for just opening their mouths just once?  What if people followed them around a store because they are always “suspicious” looking?  Who would help them?  What would their dreams be?  Who would they ask to be their dreamkeepers?

I don’t have any answers to this problem that stretches as far back as the birth of our country.  No, I take that back.  I do!  I think we should respect each other and the cultures of everyone else.  We also need to dream and dream big for those who have lost sight of dreaming for themselves and above all, be a dreamkeeper for as many as you can along the way.

I’d Rather Be Ignorant Than Stupid

I read a New York Times article a month or two ago.  I have to say that I agree with it.  I thought about it for awhile and let it go.  The same article popped up in a professional article this morning.  My mind went back to it once again.  NCLB and AYP has us with our hands tied behind our back.  Math and language arts are taking the punches now.  However, I foresee history and science being tied down as well in the future (if NCLB stays).

I know it’s important to know (roughly) when Columbus sailed the ocean blue and what To Kill a Mockingbird is all about.  After thinking…have any of you ever been asked those questions on a job interview?  Have you been stopped in the street with a camera crew to win prize money just for being able say that Hilter was a munitious maker, not a chancellor.

With our PLCs set up the way they are for next year, we can really hit home on our Power Standards and use Stiggins’s Assessment FOR Learning to help us guide our teaching.  I can’t wait…seriously!

I say we stop school now and start in the early summer.  That is how EXCITED I am about the collaboration for next year.  Math has been doing it for 2 or 3 years and now it’s OUR turn…not just language arts….ALL of us (in my school)!  I have so many exciting things I can’t wait to share with your department chairs on how we can help each other across the disciplines.

I didn’t mind the survey (in the article) saying that today’s teens “live in ’stunning ignorance’ of history and literature.”  I will take being “ignorant” ANY day over being stupid.  Ignorance can be fixed…stupidity cannot.  Someone once said, ”Ignorance is innocence-stupidity comes with experience.”

In this day and age we are obsessed with basic skills.  However, is writing an extended response a “basic skill” for life?  I’ve taken math classes all my life.  I hate it.

But, I guess I can say taking Trigonometry and learning all of that 10+ years ago is what got me my job here.  Ha ha!  If that was the case, I would be the girl holding the sign on the corner letting everyone know that K-Mart is having a sale.

We need to think about what is IMPORTANT for OUR kids to know, not what we think is important or what we like to teach.  This was a HUGE reason why I wanted to teach Creative Studies the past 2 years.  I wanted to show the students a whole new world.  I wanted to teach them about genocide (Darfur, etc,), that they CAN make it to college, what fast food does to our bodies (hey, keep the comments to yourself), about Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, Nelson Mandela, what goes on in South Africa and other parts of the world, etc.

This information is useless when it comes to the ISAT.  However, I’ve had dozens of students stop me and thank me for opening up their world and for showing them that there is more to life than that girl at the bus stop who keeps picking on you.  The world has much bigger problems that they could ever imagine.  The kids, who are now freshman, still keep in contact with me and remind me how learning about the world has changed their perspective. Not all….by any means….but there have been a lot of students come forward.  They would even ask about topics in class then we would cover them.  This was great for teaching debate.  At the same time, our kids are coming from backgrounds that even WE cannot even beging to imagine.  We need to take that into consideration as well. For some of them it’s about getting to play “mom” because the real mom is not around and doing all of that work…oh….and coming to school everyday and getting an education….and learning who started this line, “It was the best of times….”.

(For that one person out there who is still reading this, thank you.  I know I ramble.)

My LA teachers know I do.  However, I was just struck this morning.  I think it has a lot to do with ISAT and what we COULD be doing with our kids if NCLB wasn’t the monkey on our back.

I know that you ALL give 110% each day and I admire everyone who does. For those of you in a funk when it comes to school right now, think back at your time at school…maybe you can find some inspiration.

My challenge to you….don’t let our kids be ignorant of the important things.  Look at your essential vocabulary. Do the kids really need to know what those words are?  We have to choose carefully.