Monthly Archives: October 2015

literacy, NCTE

#NCTE15: G.05 Teaching Beyond the Classroom: Social Media as Teacher Activism and Professionalism

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G.05 Teaching Beyond the Classroom: Social Media as Teacher Activism and Professionalism

9:30-10:45, Saturday November 21

102DEF

Drawing on Audre Lorde’s “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” these roundtables will explore how social media (blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) can serve as the new tools to reclaim the teaching profession through teacher voice, teacher stories, and public scholarship and activism.

Chair: Paul Thomas, Furman University, Greenville, SC

Co-Chair: Sean Connors, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Roundtable 1: “Just Write: Blogging for Change” Sarah Hochstetler, Illinois State University, Mark E. Letcher, Lewis University, Joliet, IL, Leah Zuidema, Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa, Kristen Turner, Fordham University, New York, New York

Roundtable 2: “Why is no one reading my blog?” Steven Zemelman, Illinois Writing Project, Evanston, Peter Smagorinsky, The University of Georgia, Athens

Roundtable 3: “Teaching beyond the Classroom: Creating a Public Voice for Literacy Advocacy” Paul Thomas, Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina

Roundtable 4: “Fist Pumps and Paradigm Shifting: Redefining Contextual Implications of Social Constructs and Their Lived Experiences” Nakeiha Primus, Millersville University, Kristy Girardeau, Arbor Station Elementary School, Douglasville, Georgia, Shekema Silveri, IFE Academy of Teaching & Technology, Atlanta, Georgia

Roundtable 5: “Droplets, Puddles, Torrents, Waves: How Social Media Can Foster Solidarity” Julie Gorlewski, State University of New York at New Paltz

Roundtable 6: “What Is and Isn’t Covered Under the Mantle of Academic Freedom?” Christian Goering, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Roundtable 7: “Cultivating Your Role as a TeacherActivist” Shawna Coppola, Rollinsford Grade School

Roundtable 8: “Interrupting the Preschool to Prison Pipeline in Education” Jeanette Toomer, Drama Discovery and Learning, New York, New York, and New York City Department of Education, New York

See Also (uploaded as handouts)

What, Me Blog?

New Media, New Public Intellectuals

Professors as Public Intellectuals: A Reader

Safe Spaces for Teachers’ Professional Voices in a Public Sphere

race

All the White Responses (and the Game Is Rigged)

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When a black female high school student was wrestled violently from her desk and slammed to the floor by a police officer in Columbia, SC, many responded with outrage across the nation, confronting the mounting evidence that black lives do not matter—even in the supposed sanctuary of a public school.

Many also raised voices once again about the significant negative impact that zero tolerance policies and police in the hallways have on black and brown students, both male and female. As Kathleen Nolan has documented, zero tolerance policies and police in the hallways often criminalize children, a dynamic almost exclusively impacting black, brown, and impoverished children.

Assistant professor of Communication Studies at Clemson University, Chenjerai Kumanyika added yet another in-state moment of violence between police officers and youths to his advocacy for social justice and equity. In fact, Kumanyika represents the power of highlighting that #BlackLivesMatter is a necessary mantra that both targets and transcends race since he has stood beside the parents and supporters of a white teen shot and killed by a police officer and raised his voice against the excessive police violence experienced by a black girl in her desk and apparently endorsed by the school leadership.

However, among the outrage and calls for both racial equity and justice for all, we have the white responses of “yes, but”—such as this letter to the editor in The State:

It seems unbelievable that a school resource officer would respond in a physical manner because the student was disrespectful. We would expect the teacher to be in charge, and we would certainly expect any student to respond to the direct commands of a teacher or an assistant principal, but both of these school officials relied on the school resource officer to comply with their request to remove the student from the classroom.

Now we have lots of folks who were not present in the classroom, and have no direct knowledge of the student’s actions, providing guidance in how to handle an unresponsive student.

At some point we have to recognize authority will be obeyed and that enforcement consequences may be ugly beyond our expectations. I don’t have to agree with legal commands, but I do have to obey them.

“If they just did what they were told” is the coded racist response to the outrage; it is a comment heard and read about the black girl being slammed to the ground, but not echoing against the growing skepticism about a police officer shooting and killing a white male teen.

The “yes, but” responses among white and privileged commentary on police in the hallways represent the larger white denial about racism and white privilege.

The U.S. was founded (by white privileged men) through widespread refusal to obey the law. Women’s rights were gained through widespread refusal to obey the law. Civil rights were demanded through widespread refusal to obey the law.

And in 2015, ample evidence shows that neither the criminal justice system nor school disciplinary policies are equitable in terms of who is targeted and the severity of the punishments.

In a society or a school where laws and rules are themselves practiced along racial lines, as Martin Luther King Jr. implored, the right thing to do will be not to do as we are told.

But that is not a mandate for children or youth—although they too must be supported when they do take those stances. That mandate is for all adults of conscience, especially adults of conscience and privilege, and our voices must not waver when the people charged to protect and serve us take the lives and dignity of our children—because any child is everyone’s child, or we are a people without any moral authority to demand that anyone obey the laws and rules.

There is no excuse for “yes, but” from the lips or keyboards of white privilege.

These are times for listening, for having our own zero tolerance policies for abuses of power and the remaining cancer of racism among our society.

We are well past the time, also, to admit that the winners always love the rules of the game and to confront as well that this game is rigged [1].

First, then, we must demand a level playing field, one upon which every child is sacred, every person is judged on the content of their character.

Otherwise, “This rigid refusal to look at ourselves may well destroy us,” James Baldwin argued; “particularly now since if we cannot understand ourselves we will not be able to understand anything” (Baldwin, 1998, p. 593).

And the most tragic among that destruction will continue to be children and youth—too often “other people’s children.”

—

Baldwin, J. (1998). James Baldwin: Collected essays. New York, NY: The Library of America.

See Also

What happened in South Carolina is a daily risk for black children, Stacey Patton

Dear Black Children: Everyone Can Beat You!, Stacey Patton

She was guilty of being a black girl: The mundane terror of police violence in American schools, Brittney Cooper

Where Are Black Children Safe? Roxane Gay

[1] See Why are working class kids less likely to get elite jobs? They study too hard at college, Henry Farrell:

rules of the game

Education

Megalomaniacs and the Assault on the Humanities

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I exist in two marginalized disciplines—English of the “impractical” humanities and education of the soft (and “too practical”) social sciences.

In the so-called real world outside of academia, the disciplines that matter tend to be economics, political science, psychology, and the sacred “hard” sciences. Currently, I teach at a small liberal arts university, which is of a type that is increasingly being marginalized as a continuation of the larger and longer assault on the humanities, such as history, English, and the classics.

One may wonder just how the humanities have come under such relentless assault. I think I have an answer.

Daedalus earned the status of master craftsman, goes the myth, including the ability to build wings for humans to fly. But once he constructed these wings, Daedalus warned his son, Icarus, not to fly too close to the sun, less those wings would melt.

Myth, you see, defies the strictures of the hard sciences, such as physics, which would render this narrative with so many holes that no one would pay attention to the message; yet, the Daedalus/Icarus myth has endured, even replicated in the visual arts:

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Bruegel

And poetry, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” W.H. Auden.

At the center of the Icarus myth—defying his father, his fall—is the recurring message of the humanities: beware human pride (hubris). It can be found again and again in classic literature/art, modern literature/art, and history.

Like the people and the world in Bruegel’s painting and Auden’s acknowledgement, we seem determined to turn away from this warning—and not without prompting from those who are filled with pride, the megalomaniacs who run the U.S.

Since the race for president now confronts us, just watch and listen carefully—megalomaniacs flying too close to the sun and demanding that we should follow.

The same megalomaniacs who assault and discredit the Humanities, where their kind litter the real and virtual landscapes.

Trump had it rough, you see, starting with a little million dollar loan and living off the fruits of how kind bankruptcy is to the Icaruses of the business world; you see he gets to fly too close again and again, nearly unscathed, and uses that to demand that we should follow, we should trust him to lead us.

And while Trump is a bit extreme, a bit cartoonish, he is the megalomaniac class that runs the U.S.—and his popularity proves how blind the average person is to this charade.

And while the megalomaniacs call for more mice to trot through the sacred disciplines—economic, political science, psychology, and the “hard” sciences—the way out of this mess lies forever there in the humanities, where the megalomaniacs are tragic, where their own voices are used to expose their folly.

Auden notes “how everything turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster,” but the disaster is not someone else’s; the disaster is ours.

Education

Rejecting Police in the Hallways: A Reader (Updated)

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UPDATE

Arrested Learning: A survey of youth experiences of police and security at school

School Police Don’t Make These Students Feel Safe. Here’s Why.

Reporting at NPR:

Authorities are investigating a classroom incident between a white sheriff’s deputy and a black high school student in Columbia, S.C., where the deputy, a school resource officer, flipped the female student’s desk backward and dragged her to the ground.

This violent response to being a black girl in school continues the pattern that proves in the U.S. “other people’s children” (read black, brown, poor) do not matter. Parallel to evidence of police violence that black lives do not matter, this abuse of power in a SC school must raise a voice against what Kathleen Nolan documents in Police in the Hallways; see:

Journal of Educational Controversy – Review: Police in the Hallways: Confronting the “Culture of Control” [journal abstract link]

My review ends:

Broadly, then, Nolan’s Police in the Hallways forces the reader to consider how the line between the police state in and out of school has become blurred in some children’s lives. It is a harsh lesson about how middle-class norms mask a cultural willingness to subject other people’s children (Delpit, 2006) to institutional policies and messages that no middle-class or affluent parents would accept for their own children:

In a grossly inequitable school system and stratified society, punitive urban school disciplinary policies serve the interests of the white middle and wealthy classes, as poor youth of color are demonized through the discourses of zero tolerance and subjected to heavy policing. (Kindle Locations 2391-2392)

See Also

Resource Officer’s Violence Toward Student Raises Fundamental Question That Most Miss

#AssaultAtSpringValleyHigh: Deputy Ben Fields Sued Twice In Federal Court

Student Who Videotaped Incident Speaks Out

Racism affects black girls as much as boys. So why are girls being ignored?

FBI investigation sought in S.C. school incident caught on video

South Carolina sheriff’s deputy on leave after dragging student from her desk

Another Black Girl Assaulted by White Cop: Do We Matter Yet?

White America will ignore this video: The hideous & predictable violence of our schools, our legal system, our society

Greenville News: COMMENTARY: Are black children criminalized in schools?

Testing

Dear USDOE, Testing Disaster Is Yours, and You Still Don’t Get It: A Reader

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Let’s not miss that in the same week that vice president (and plagiarist) Joe Biden holds a press conference to announce what he plans not to do (o, the narcissism of the ruling class!), the U.S. Department of Education has come to some sort of Onion-esque realization that students are being subjected to an inordinate number of standardized tests (although it seems the USDOE is able only to worry about the redundancy and excessive number of tests).

The Ozymandias (I mean, Obama) administration has announced:

“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

And let’s not fail to acknowledge that such vapid bureaucratic nonsense is inevitably the result of know-nothings being appointed to positions of power (think never-taught Arne Duncan serving as Secretary of Education in the wake of Margaret Dishonest-or-Incompetent Spellings turning her hollow SOE gig into becoming president of the University of North Carolina, resulting in her bragging about having none of the background experiences typical of leading higher education).

You see, U.S. education became a test-corrupted venture in the early decades of the twentieth century, which was documented and confronted by Raymond Callahan in 1962 as the cult of efficiency.

Yes, 1962.

But know-nothings in positions of power can only confirm the truism: those unaware of the past are doomed to repeat it.

Finally, let’s be very clear that the number of unnecessary standardized tests equals anything greater than zero.

And to confirm that we are over-testing students—and that it isn’t a problem of bad tests or redundant tests, but the test fetish itself—here is a reader:

Confirmed: Standardized testing has taken over our schools. But who’s to blame?

Whatever Happened to Scientifically Based Research in Education Policy?

The Conversation: Tests don’t improve learning. And PARCC will be no different

What If Standardized Tests Were Biased Against Whites, Males, Affluent?

Is There an Alternative to Accountability-Based, Corporate Education Reform?

Corporations Are Behind The Common Core State Standards — And That’s Why They’ll Never Work

Common Core State Standards, William Mathis (NEPC)

Are Common Core and Testing Debates “Two Different Matters”?

Do High-Stakes Tests Improve Learning?, Michael Hout, Stuart Elliott, Sara Frueh

Conclusions

Looking across all of the combinations of incentives, the committee found that when evaluated using low-stakes tests, incentives’ overall effects on achievement tend to be small and are effectively zero for a number of programs. Even when evaluated using the high-stakes tests attached to the incentives, a number of programs show only small effects.

The largest effects resulted from incentives applied to schools, such as those used in NCLB. Even here, however, the effect size of 0.08 is the equivalent of moving a student performing at the 50th percentile to the 53rd percentile. Raising student achievement in the United States to reach the level of the highest-performing nations would require a gain equivalent to moving a student at the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile. Unfortunately, no intervention has been demonstrated to produce an increase that dramatic. The improvement generated by school-based incentives is no less than that shown by other successful educational interventions.

However, although some types of incentives perform as well as other interventions, given the immense amount of policy emphasis that incentives have received during the past three decades, the amount of improvement they have produced so far is strikingly small. The study committee concluded that despite using incentives in various forms for 30 years, policymakers and educational administrators still do not know how to use them to consistently generate positive effects on student achievement and drive improvements in education.

De-Testing and De-Grading Schools: Authentic Alternatives to Accountability and Standardization

Writing

Fostering the Transition from Student to Writer

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Just past midterm in my first year writing seminar, I asked my two sections of students to brainstorm about what behaviors that worked for them in high school have failed to work for them in the first semester of college—focusing specifically on their roles as academic writers.

Part of this exercise has been supported by my adopting Keith Hjortshoj’s The Transition to College Writing as well as my instructional commitment to providing my students overt opportunities to set aside their student behaviors and adopt writer (scholar) behaviors.

The responses were illuminating about both how often high school fails students and that many of my students have in fact begun to understand the important transition from high school to college. Several students confronted the need to start their essays much earlier, spending more time on drafting their work (and adding not to write the night before the work is due), but one student offered an excellent recognition about the need for writers to have a primary audience and then to shape their purpose with that audience in mind; he framed that response against the superficial ways in which he had been allowed to consider audience as a reader in high school.

Just a few days after this exercise with my first year students, as a co-leader of a year-long faculty seminar on teaching writing, my colleagues had an equally enlightening discussion about our experiences with learning to write throughout our formal education, reaching from K-12 through graduate school.

Some key patterns included that many of us had our writing graded, but received little feedback designed to prompted revision, and that many of us had some of the best direct writing instruction during our graduate school experiences, notably while writing a thesis/dissertation.

Ultimately, we noted that many professors were attempting to teach courses (first year composition) that we never took ourselves and teach pedagogy that we had never experienced as students.

And then came a really key discussion: We acknowledged that our own writing—and especially our own engagement in writing—was at its best when we had authentic audiences and were working with topics of our choice. Of course, we then moved to recognizing that these are the qualities our own students need (even deserve) to become the sort of young writers and scholars that we envision.

These discussion pushed me, after over thirty years teaching writing, to think about a recent conference I had with a first-year student whose work/writing and classroom behavior remain trapped in high school. He is not engaged in class, and when we conferenced about his essay 2—I was compelled to note in my comments on the paper that few professors would accept the essay since the formatting was shoddy and the work did not meet the basic requirements of the assignment—I first asked if he had read the sample essays I provided for the assignment. He immediately said that he had not, and seemed completely unconcerned that he hadn’t.

I have no desire to ascribe blame, but this student (and most of my students about whom I have concern for their success this semester) is almost completely disengaged from the course except to comply and move on. In other words, the quality of his writing and behavior in class are not necessarily representations of his ability but are reflections of the absence of what we discussed in our faculty seminar—he doesn’t see anything authentic about his audience or purposes as a writer in this class.

Here I must stress the warning I often share with teachers-to-be and current teachers in my graduate courses: We must not require 100% success in order to embrace a practice.

Now, that said, here are the strategies I have developed over those 30-plus years that are designed to foster the transition from student to writer/scholar:

  • Balance giving students choice with providing them the sort of structure that builds toward the larger writing goals of the course. My first year writing seminar is a semester-long course that requires students to submit four original essays of about 1000-1500 words each. For several years, the essays were all open-ended assignments with students deciding the type and content of each essay. That was a failed approach. Now, I move the student from a personal narrative (see the essay assignments on my syllabus) to an on-line essay that uses hyperlinks for citation and incorporates images and/or videos to a disciplinary-based traditionally cited (APA, MLA, etc.) essay and then to a final essay that we determine the type based on the student’s needs once we have the first essays to consider.
  • Focus investigations of texts in class on reading like a writer (see here and here) so that we always acknowledge the primary audience of the text and how the writer shapes the purpose of the writing to that primary audience. Students are provided many authentic models for the types of writing they are writing (see my daily schedule as well as posts on the main page of our course blog). Both our class sessions examining text and then the essay assignments are anchored in real-world essays (including published academic essays) that we mine for how writers write.
  • Provide feedback on essays and in individual conferences that support revision strategies that are actionable and manageable. Increasingly, I have reduced markings and comments on essay drafts, and then dedicated individual conferences to asking students about their essays while working toward making sure the student has a clear revision plan once the conference is completed. It is during these conferences that I can confront whether or not the student is authentically engaged in an essay—and seek ways to make sure the student has a genuine reason to write and revise further.

Again, nothing in teaching will be 100% successful, but I believe we are doing our students a great disservice if we simply give into fatalism and continue to allow writing to be assignments that student dutifully complete in order to receive course credit.

My commitment as a teacher of writing is to foster a transition from student to writer that serves my students well as young people on a journey to their own autonomy— and even happiness.

That means I am on a journey as well as a teacher of writing.

Education, No Excuses Reform, race, zero tolerance

Why Do the Privileged View Equity as “Hard Work”?

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Let’s start with this: Privileged people in the U.S. embrace what amounts to a lie—that success is mostly the result of effort, notably that education is the key to success.

However, the evidence is overwhelming that being born wealthy trumps effort (including educational attainment) by people born into poverty and especially by black and brown people regardless of socioeconomic status.

White, wealth, and male privilege remains the most powerful combination in the U.S.

Let’s also note that formal education, instead of eradicating inequity, often works to reflect and even expand the equity gap for impoverished, black, and brown children [1]. And “other people’s children” experience much harsher disciplinary policies in those schools, such as zero tolerance, that reflect and perpetuate race and class inequity as well.

And it may be that the root of this disturbing gap between what the privileged claim and the reality of being born and living in the U.S. is that those in power argue that taking action for equity is “hard work,” and thus themselves lack the grit or growth mindset (qualities being used—projected onto as deficits—to further demonize poor, black, and brown children) to actually do what is necessary to close the equity gap.

For example, although mind-numbingly late, some are beginning to recognize the racially inequitable discriminatory practices among many so-called “no excuses” charter schools, such as Success Academy. Yet, when those practices are confronted, we read these caveats:

The challenge posed to Success Academy and similar charter schools by the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Education’s guidance on student discipline is serious. To be in conformance with civil rights law, these schools will need to make radical reforms to their “no excuses” school culture and practices. Now that Moskowitz has laid down the gauntlet on this issue, many eyes will be on the Obama administration for its response. Changing policies, practices and cultures to make schools into safe and welcoming places that do not resort to the excessive and discriminatory use of suspensions and expulsions is hard, challenging work.

Ending discriminatory practices that disproportionately impact black and brown children living in poverty is “hard, challenging work”? Really?

In my home state of South Carolina, we discover, that despite decades of gross negligence of high-poverty, majority-black public schools in pockets mostly throughout the lower part of the state, the response is much the same:

It is difficult to know how to do that — although it would be much less difficult if we stopped worrying about turf protection and job protections and making sure the right people get lucrative contracts and pursuing our ideological goals.

It is difficult to get our legislators and our governor to ignore those distractions. But it is their job to do that….

The sad thing is that as difficult as it will be for our leaders to develop a plan and our teachers to implement it, the hardest part could be convincing ourselves that it’s worth doing.

In case we missed it, educational equity for all children in SC (read “poor,” read “black”) is “difficult.” Again, really?

The racist and classist stereotyping at the end of privileged finger-pointing is disgusting—calls for some children simply to work harder, blaming impoverished parents for not caring about education or their children, and making cavalier and rash arguments about either the great failure of schools and teachers or idealistic promises about schools and teachers.

No, it is neither hard nor difficult to do the right thing. It is simply that those with privilege in the U.S. do not care about equity, do not care about marginalized people or children. While the words say “hard” and “difficult,” the actions speak much louder: We do not care.

“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation,” James Baldwin warned at mid-twentieth century. “The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.”

Let’s end with this: The challenge is not for the poor, not for black and brown people; the challenge is for those who have the power to change things but remain impotent because that challenge is “hard,” that challenge is “difficult.”

—

[1] Poor, black, and brown children disproportionately are subjected to larger class sizes, un-/under-certified teachers, underfunded schools, and reduced curriculums (test prep).

Childhood

Portrait of the Artist under High Capitalism: Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children

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Any child is stronger than a mother, since the love we have for our children could kill us.

The Small Backs of Children, Lidia Yuknavitch

About a quarter into Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children, the reader discovers the novels’ title as the playwright sits in the hospital while his sister, the writer, is mysteriously wasting away: as children, the playwright has the pair perform Shakespeare, her as Romeo and him as Juliet, and once she improvises the line, “Pity the small backs of children” (p. 59).

And it is here also in this chapter that along with the central image of the girl, the dominant motif of the narrative is exposed:

The playwright stops typing for a second and stares at his hands on the laptop. He can’t believe he’s already writing this. Already twisting it into art. Cannibal. He feels a pang of guilt. You’re in a hospital. Your poor sister is dying. But even has his heart is beating him up in his chest, he can’t not do it. He can’t….If he doesn’t get it down now, it will blur and hum away like a train. (p. 58)

This novel came to me through a tweet by Laurie Penny, and then the cover and title demanded I read:

I was transfixed by that cover and title—and would come to realize the brilliant and awful paradox of the cover since the novel’s central image is that of an Eastern European girl blown free of her family killed in that blast, the ceaseless violence of her native land, a photograph captured by the photographer, a photograph that brings disruptive and uncomfortable praise and an award:

Remember what Virginia Woolf said: Give back the awards, should you be cleverly tricked into believing they mean something. Do not forget that the door you are being ushered through has a false reality on the other side. Do not forget that the door is opening only on someone else’s terms, someone else’s definition of open. (pp. 48-49)

Yuknavitch crafts a gut-wrenching and heart-wrenching work that reads simultaneously as narrative fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, but also blurs stark realism with allegory.

The characters are all status: the writer, the girl, the widow, the playwright, the filmmaker, the photographer, the performance artist, the poet, and the painter.

Tying everything together, however, is “[e]veryone I love is an artist” (p. 9). While the novel weaves a gripping story around the orphaned and abused girl who is inextricably linked to the main American artists of the narration, the overarching message of the novel is a portrait of the artist under high capitalism, what the playwright identifies above as cannibalism (see the link between zombies and capitalism here) and what the writer admits in the second chapter:

We make art, but in relation to what exactly? All the artists we admired from the past came out of the mouths of wars and crises. Life and Death. We come out of high capitalism. Consumerist monsterhood. Even when our lives went to shit, they were still just our lives. Our puny, overdramatic, American lives. (p. 10)

Like Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State, The Small Backs of Children is both hard to put down and hard to read because the abuse and violence juxtaposed in the horrors of the girl’s life and the narcissism and folly of the American artists’ lives are equally compelling and repelling.

Throughout the story, the essential nature of love, sex, and art seems corrupted by the high capitalism of the American artists, especially as their lives contrast with the Eastern European girl, who out of repeated rape, the obliteration of her family, and years spent living with a widow herself becomes the sort of artist that the writer has framed against the recurring awareness found in, for example, the performance artist:

She sighs the big sigh of twenty-six, wondering if we are all trapped inside identity, genetics, and narrative—some whacked-out Kafka god handwriting our unbearable little life stories. Then she thinks an American-artist thought, the rough-and-tumble kind: how can I use this? (p. 111)

Ultimately, the novel is as often poetic (“The girl is so beautiful it feels violent. Like god appearing to an atheist” [p. 171]) as it is graphic and caustic. It proves to be the sort of redeeming art about art that frets over the soulless consequences of capitalism and consumerism:

This is what’s bad: The Nixon administration. The Reagan administration. The Bush administrations. War. Poverty. Injustice. Christians. Oils. Racists. Global warming. Homophobia. Corporations. The plight of third world nations.

This is money. (pp. 193-194)

And like the girl, the reader is left with a powerful and even uplifting view of art’s potential:

The widow tells the girl, “Do not listen to what any society tells you about the body—the body is the metaphor for all experience. A woman’s body more than any other. Like language, its beautiful but weaker sister. Look at this poem. This painting. Look at these photographs. The body doesn’t lie.” (p. 117)

Neither does this novel as a meditation on art as well as the violence that is the lives of children and women.

See Also

death bed (the silent spines of books)

grammar, Writing

Fostering Convention Awareness in Students: Eschewing a Rules-Based View of Language

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The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

“The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats

[W]e should not, under the guise of developing literary standards, merely pass along adult weariness.

“Analysis of Cliches and Abstractions,” Lou LaBrant (1949)

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Henry David Thoreau

Let us start with two writers from the monuments of “great authors”—Chaucer and Shakespeare (like Prince and Madonna, from the land of one-name people). Both Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote with double negatives and double comparatives/superlatives. In their eras, these constructions were emphatic, not breaking some rule of grammar.

Now for context: On the Teaching and Learning Forum of the NCTE Connected Community a battle has been waged (one rivaling Beowulf versus Grendel) over the use of “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun.

That’s right, while a presidential election is brewing, we teachers of English are hotly debating pronoun/antecedent agreement.

So it is here, as a 30+-year English teacher and teacher of future and current English teachers, I would like to make a stand for descriptive grammar as a compromise for the unrelenting grammar war.

How, I can feel you asking, can taking a side be a compromise? Let me try to explain.

My journey to how I teach grammar, mechanics, and usage has been profoundly informed by the history of the English language and linguists—both of which strongly support a descriptive view of language that recognizes and embraces change.

As well, I am a writer, one who uses the language in the service of my craft, and thus, one who does not work within rules, but through an awareness of conventional usage.

Two key points are worth examining more fully—conventions and awareness.

Language does not function under rules (fixed and prescriptive) but under conventions that are both situational and temporal. Again, read Chaucer or Shakespeare with a keen eye on their usages that became “incorrect,” or peruse Nathaniel Hawthorn’s writing for Olympic gold medal amounts of commas, many of which in our contemporary time would not be used with absolutely no loss of meaning.

Language conventionality, in fact, is a much healthier view of language usage than rules since those conventions are organic, growing out of actual language usage that gravitates toward effective (and even efficient) communication of ideas.

“Why are these homies dissin my girl? Why do they gotta front?” from Weezer reflects the tendency of language to clip—”dissin” for “disrespecting” and “front” for “putting on a front.” Again, Rivers Cuomo and Weezer are representing the exact manipulations of language found in Shakespeare, who is nearly the pinnacle of “authors we worship.”

Next, the key to my argument that a descriptive view of language is a compromise in the grammar war is teaching convention awareness instead of rules acquisition (see Johns for a parallel examination of genre awareness versus genre acquisition).

Taught with a descriptive approach to language (for example, noting that many if not most people use “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun), convention awareness addresses both that conventions exist, and often with status marking consequences (see Weaver’s Teaching Grammar in Context), and that some conventions are in flux (I was taught a rigid distinction between “shall” and “will,” one now defunct with dearly departed “shall,” and contemporary students remain confronted with a similar rigid view of “who” and “whom,” whilst poor “whom” is barely breathing and Hospice surely is on the ready).

In other words, the descriptive view of language acknowledges the prescriptive view, and ultimately renders the student an agent in their use of the language (see what I did there?). However, the prescriptive rules-based approach to language necessarily ignores or marginalizes the much more historically and linguistically sound descriptive view.

I teach my students that pronoun/antecedent agreement remains a status marking usage convention for many in the academic world—highlighting that while common usage of “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun is increasing, many in academia or formal publishing remain committed to “they” as always plural, noting, however, that many in academia also strongly conform to gender-neutral and gender-sensitive usages of language.

Ultimately, I want my students to recognize that conventions (and especially viewing language through rules) is about power—who decides what for whom (a few short breaths and chest compressions).

For our students to be aware, then, of both descriptive and prescriptive views of language, for those students to gain a recognition that language use is about purpose and choice, bound by situation and audience, is for them to become agents in how their own credibility and authority is viewed.

As a final plea from someone who teaches first-year writing to college students, I want to note that students who have been taught a rules-based view of language are often disillusioned as soon as they see how often professional writers are not conforming to those rules. Like fragments. Those students tend to struggle with gaining their own voices and their own autonomy over language.

In other words, a rules-based view of language tends to erode a student’s appreciation of the beauty and power of language—while teaching convention awareness fosters in students both the moves for and enjoyment in investigating language usage.

Encouraging students to enthusiastically wrestle with language is a goal of our English classes worth fighting for (wink-wink, nod-nod).

So this is my modest proposal, one dedicated to a full and complex appreciation of language usage.

It is also a plea for a much healthier approach to language that understands “they” most certainly will be a gender-neutral singular pronoun soon, just as “whom” is about to join “shall” in the great archaic constructions in the sky.

All that is sure to remain is the language itself, and it is ours to treat it and our students with the kindness and dignity they deserve.

See Also

From Ken Lindblom on the Teaching and Learning Forum:

For more, please see our book, Grammar Rants (includes the introduction for free) or our freely-available English Journal article, “Analyzing Grammar Rants: An Alternative to Traditional Grammar Instruction.” 

Another great resource is Edgar Schuster’s Breaking the Rules.

Students: Do Experts Follow the Rules You’re Taught?, Judith Landrum

Steven Pinker: ‘Many of the alleged rules of writing are actually superstitions’

Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct

Here Is Why We Need Transgender Pronouns

The Washington Post will allow singular ‘they’

The Singular “They” — When Pronouns Get Personal

It’s time for gender-free pronouns, Katharine Whitehorn