All posts by plthomasedd

P. L. Thomas, Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is a former column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English), current series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres (Brill), and author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means (IAP, 2019) and How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP, in press). NCTE named Thomas the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. He co-edited the award-winning (Divergent Book Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies Research) volume Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America (Brill, 2018). Follow his work @plthomasEdD and the becoming radical (https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/).

Grit, privilege

Judging an Iceberg by the Tip Only: The Cumulative Effects of Opportunities for Students

June 7, 2015 plthomasedd 1 Comment

“[M]ost of what poor people have in common has nothing to do with their culture or dispositions [laziness]. Instead, it has to do with what they experience, such as the bias and lack of access to basic needs” (p. 26).

Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap, Paul Gorski

Throughout the first several years as a high school English teacher in rural Upstate South Carolina (in my hometown high school, in fact), I believe I learned far more lessons than I taught.

In those first couple years, I had different ability levels of classes (yes, we tracked every grade with low, average, honors, and Advanced Placement) and multiple grade levels as well—resulting in my juggling as a beginning teacher 13 textbooks among my five courses. Several of the so-called “general” classes were at maximum capacity, 35 students, as well.

One of the most vivid and troubling lessons recurred year after year in my general senior English course: Students, in a burst of maturity accompanied by the realization that adulthood loomed, approached me about taking the SAT and applying to college.

General track students, typically, had been in courses for years specifically designed for students not applying for college; therefore, these students were destined to do poorly on the SAT (because of a combination of their inadequate coursework for many years and their socioeconomic status, mostly working-poor and working-class households) and have their belated motivation squashed.

Although not a popular response, I often replied with: “Well, first go back in time. And then, read, read, read.”

If possible, of course, that solution was and remains quite accurate, but my larger point was addressing the cumulative impact of life and educational experiences that students either have or miss—and that the quality and amount of those experiences are more strongly correlated with the coincidences of those students’ births than with the content of their character.

These students came rushing back to me this spring during my May Experience course on educational documentaries.

My university is a small selective liberal arts environment, and we have a relatively privileged and white student body—despite efforts shared by many universities to increase diversity. One of the unintended consequences of our May X program has been that athletes typically take these courses, and since our student-athletes are more racially diverse than our larger student body, my May X classes have usually been more racially and gender diverse than courses during the main semesters.

This May, my class was about 1/3 students of color and included more males than usual as well.

One day we were discussing Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses in high schools, and when I asked students to raise their hands if they had taken A.P. or I.B., I immediately noticed on the one side of the room where several black student-athletes sat, the students had not raised their hands.

Possibly as a result of this discussion, one black male student-athlete wrote his public piece (they were asked to write a public piece addressing misconceptions about education) on his own background in high school, his recognition that students given access to A.P. had a significant advantage over students not allowed in or offered A.P. courses.

This young man noted that his college experience has highlighted for him his own disadvantage among students who had different backgrounds that he was afforded.

So when I saw Darryl Robinson’s I went to some of D.C.’s best schools. I was still unprepared for college, I immediately saw the faces of my high school students from decades ago blend with the students this May.

Despite his “work[ing] extremely hard to get [to college],” Robinson makes a powerful admission:

But after arriving on campus before the school year, with a full scholarship, I quickly felt unprepared and outmatched — and it’s taken an entire year of playing catch-up in the classroom to feel like I belong. I know that ultimately I’m responsible for my education, but I can’t help blaming the schools and teachers I had in my early years for my struggles today.

Robinson’s story is disturbing and important—and one that must be read carefully so that we turn our eyes away from Robinson himself and to the larger context he is ultimately condemning.

First, Robinson is the embodiment of the racial and class inequities suffered by students, but as he details very well, Robinson also is caught in the “good student trap”—as highlighted by his recognition of how his writing instruction failed him:

I first noticed the gap between me and my classmates after my first writing assignment at Georgetown. In an English class to help prepare incoming freshmen, we were asked to analyze the main character’s development in “Persepolis,” a graphic memoir about growing up in Tehran during the Iranian revolution. I thought it was an easy assignment. Everyone’s papers were distributed to the class, and it was immediately obvious how mine fell short: I merely summarized the plot of the book without making any real argument. I got a D-minus.

I did what I’d been taught growing up in school: memorize and regurgitate information. Other Georgetown freshmen from better schools had been trained to form original, concise thoughts within a breath, to focus less on remembering every piece of information, word for word, and more on forming independent ideas. I was not. I could memorize and recite facts and figures, but I didn’t know how to think for myself. Now, in an attempt to think deeper, I sometimes overthink myself into silence.

Without this first-person account from Robinson, many who claim that success in school and life in the U.S. is mostly a consequence of effort and resilience may continue to point the accusatory finger at the tip of the iceberg and draw their distorted conclusions about outcomes—without regard to the tremendous weight of the opportunities (and lack thereof) below the surface. As Robinson notes about his first experiences with A.P. classes:

It dawned on me that this was what college would be like. But with less than two years left in high school, would I be ready? Before that class, all the papers I had written were hardly analytical, simply retelling the plot of a book. I felt cheated.

Robinson’s story is possibly dangerous since he has somehow found himself at Georgetown University despite great odds against him and despite his realization that he remains behind his classmates for reasons not of his doing.

Robinson is an outlier in many respects, and it is alluring in the U.S. to read him as a model of the power of resilience without asking why some children are condemned to a real-life Hunger Games while some children are praised as smart and “gritty” without recognizing their privilege.

And then, stories, ironically, of the typical child of color growing up in poverty remains ignored—like the great majority of the iceberg below the surface.

Who is telling this story?:

As it turns out, the conditions that attend poverty—what a National Scientific Council report summarized as “overcrowding, noise, substandard housing, separation from parent(s), exposure to violence, family turmoil,” and other forms of extreme stress—can be toxic to the developing brain, just like drug or alcohol abuse. These conditions provoke the body to release hormones such as cortisol, which is produced in the adrenal cortex. Brief bursts of cortisol can help a person manage difficult situations, but high stress over the long term can be disastrous. In a pregnant woman, the hormone can “get through the placenta into the fetus,” Levitt told me, potentially influencing her baby’s brain and tampering with its circuitry. Later, as the same child grows up, cortisol from his own body may continue to sabotage the development of his brain.

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Basing our demands of schools, teachers, and students on accountability for outcomes is judging an iceberg by the tip only.

That narrow and misguided view of teaching, learning, and humans is misreading success and failure (attributing them disproportionately to effort and resilience) while also ignoring the cumulative impact of access to rich and sustained opportunities (privilege) versus being denied those rich opportunities while also suffering inordinate and sustained stress (poverty and racism).

And the greatest failure of all in this call for accountability and education reform is that instead of trying to create for children in poverty the sorts of life and school experiences afforded the wealthy, children of color and impoverished children are being diagnosed as deficient (the word gap, lack “grit”) and then being subjected to the worst possible educational experiences: increased stressful environments (academic and disciplinary), reduced academic experiences (test-prep), narrowed curriculum (so-called core disciplines with no P.E. or fine arts), and an anemic teacher workforce (inexperienced, scripted, un-/under-qualified).

We do not need to raise our students test scores. We do not need to gather data on the “grit” of our students so we can teach them “grit.” We do not need slogans about “no excuses” that trivialize the realities of children’s lives as if they should walk through the doors of schools and magically ignore the weight of their lives—lives they did not create.

We do need to admit that outcomes and behaviors reflect an entire life, and that many we label “successful” have had the opportunities that those we label “failing” or “at risk” have been denied.

As a society, we are starving some children, weighing them, labeling them underweight, and then accusing them of not working as hard as their well-nourished peers.

So let me return to my current students at a selective university.

These students are in fact very bright and capable. I love them dearly. But they are not successful primarily because they have some qualities other students do not have.

My students represent the consequences of rich and diverse experiences over many years of mostly privileged lives.

This is how nearly all children could be if we genuinely had the resilience ourselves to make that happen.

Florida Miracle, grade retention

Dear Florida: Mean People Suck

June 5, 2015 plthomasedd 2 Comments

Dear Florida:

I know it is impolite to use harsh language and teachers often discourage students from resorting to cliches, but I am hard-pressed to find anything better suited to my concern about education policy in Florida (and Mississippi, and South Carolina, along with another 10+ states) than reminding political leaders and the public in your state: Mean people suck.

And as disturbing as it is when adults are mean to adults, there simply is no way to justify adults being mean to children—or in the case of misguided and uninformed education policy in Florida (and Mississippi, and South Carolina), adults being mean to some children (mostly black, brown, and poor).

I take this opportunity to reach out to you, Florida, because there is a way out of this mean streak: Fewer 3^r^d-graders could be held back this year.

First, let me note that the avenue to a kind and equitable education system is not examining whether or not your (yet again) new high-stakes tests are valid, but recognizing that grade retention is discredited by a large body of research and grade retention is not a credible form of literacy policy.

Notably, the National Council of Teachers of English, the largest organization of English teachers in the U.S., has a clear position statement against grade retention based on high-stakes testing:

Resolved, that the National Council of Teachers of English strongly oppose legislation mandating that children, in any grade level, who do not meet criteria in reading be retained.

And be it further resolved that NCTE strongly oppose the use of high-stakes test performance in reading as the criterion for student retention.

As well, education policies such as grade retention linked to high-stakes testing disproportionately and negatively impact black, brown, and poor children.

Simply put, grade retention as a policy must be acknowledged as punishing children for the sake of punishing children.

None the less, Florida has become a flawed model for educational accountability across the U.S.

So, as a life-long educator in SC, where that model is now turning my home state into yet another place where mean people suck, I ask that Florida end grade retention and use your ill-got influence to start a new trend in education reform—one that rejects punitive education policy and chooses instead to treat all children with dignity, to provide all children an equitable opportunity to learn.

Grit

More Thoughts on “Grit” and the Sloganification of Education Reform

June 5, 2015 plthomasedd 3 Comments

If anyone is truly interested in confronting the “soft bigotry” (not of “low expectations”) that is veiled racism/classism, please consider that an increasing number of black, brown, and poor students are being marched through the school day to “Work hard. Be nice.”

It is dehumanizing and a shallow lie to treat “other people’s children” as deficient of the so-called “grit” that the adults themselves never need and often fail to demonstrate while living in a state of privilege.

However, it seems that being pithy is the way to go if one wishes to be a real education reformer.

So consider these handy slogans (I reserve the right to update as needed):

The “grit” approach to education is treating the patient based on a false diagnosis while refusing to address the real cause of the disease.
“Grit” advocates who tell poor kids “you can do anything if you work hard enough” themselves say there is nothing they can do about poverty.
Telling children without boots to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is heinous.
Claiming “a rising tide lifts all boats” is cruel if we ignore those with leaking boats and those without boats.

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The race and class bigotry of “no excuses” and “grit” approaches to educational practices and policies can be understood as yet more evidence of a long history of “blaming the victim” (Ryan, 1971, Blaming the victim. New York: Vintage Books).

As Paul C. Gorksi explains:

In other words, to use an education example, we deny people in poverty access to equal educational opportunity, access to healthcare, and even access to air unspoiled by environmental hazards. We do this for generations and then, when some low-income youth don’t do well on standardized tests or drop out of school or seem disengaged in class, we forget about these iequities and blame it on their “culture.” (p. 54)

Meritocracy, privilege, race

The Real American Success Story

June 4, 2015 plthomasedd 3 Comments

In the early 1990s after we had moved into our first stand-alone home (having lived in an owned townhouse a few years), my wife and I bought a Honda Accord—a typically American milestone of having finally risen above our station as Honda Civic owners.

As I was dong the paperwork for this car, I realized that the sale price was the same as what my parents had paid for their house in 1971 (a house, by the way, that still is more square footage than any house I have ever owned): $22,500.

I am one generation removed from the white working-class idealists who are my parents, both having been raised in the South during the 1950s—my mother the daughter of a mill worker and my father the son of a gas station owner.

Buying that Honda Accord, however, did not at that moment fill me with pride or a sense accomplishment. It made me feel extremely uncomfortable. I even called my father and told him about the coincidence of the prices of a car for me and the house my parents had worked themselves nearly to death to own.

My parents’ house sits on the largest lot of a local golf course, their having bought it as the course was being built and then scraped and clawed until they had the $1000 downpayment. Their monthly mortgage payment was also less than many of my car payments.

And while most people—especially my parents—would hold me up as proof of all that is Right with the U.S., I have to raise a hand of caution.

Yes, I have worked hard, but most of my success has come in academic settings—being a top student, and then working my way through undergraduate and graduate degrees while also having two careers, first as a high school teacher and now as a professor. To be perfectly blunt and honest, my success has been built on tremendous privilege—being white and male—and what appears to be hard work to many has in fact not been that hard for me at all.

Success in education depends a great deal on reading and writing—two behaviors that are for me both a joy and mostly easy to do.

In his Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty, Paul C. Gorski notes “that many of us were raised to believe that the United States and its schools represent a meritocracy, wherein people achieve what they achieve based solely on their merit, so that all achievement is deserved rather than rendered” (pp. 14-15).

Historically, this American success story has been “tied to the Horatio Alger myth (Pascale, 2005) and the notions of rugged individualism and an ethic of self-sacrifice,” Gorski explains—what we often reduce to as “pulling ones self up by the bootstraps.”

However, this myth is nothing more than a twisted fairy tale—one that normalizes outliers and depends on a very ugly and false characterization of people in poverty: The impoverished, the subtext goes, create their poverty through their laziness.

The mostly false American success story keeps the accusatory gaze always on people in poverty so that little attention is paid to the larger forces of inequity in the U.S.

Gorski warns, “[M]ost of what poor people have in common has nothing to do with their culture or dispositions [ie., charges of laziness]. Instead, it has to do with what they experience, such as the bias and lack of access to basic needs” (p. 26).

Social forces—many of which are created and then perpetuated by privilege—drive conditions of scarcity (poverty) and slack (privilege) that are then reflected in the conditions surrounding and behaviors by individual people (see Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much).

Therefore, we must confront the real American success story, the one that is typical of life in the U.S. and not one that misrepresents outliers as the expectations for everyone.

In the U.S., the floors of the penthouse of the wealthy are incredibly secure and stable, the few cracks are nearly as tight as they are rare. The best road to success in the U.S. is to be born wealthy.

As well, the ceilings on the basement of poverty are incredibly secure, allowing only a rare fortunate few through by superhuman efforts.

Instead of Horatio Alger, then, we must look to our own former president George W. Bush, who regularly joked about his C-student status, and whose SAT score both reflected a score higher than his GPA and fell below most of his peers accepted in Ivy League educations (an ironic two-fer that exposes the SAT as mostly a measure of wealth and privilege as well as showing how connectedness, being a legacy, is a privileged version of affirmative action).

George W. Bush has been very open as well about his struggle with alcoholism and his relatively unimpressive efforts at adulthood until he was nearly 40. Despite those hurdles and signs of laziness, he acquired part-ownership of the Texas Rangers and then became governor of Texas and president of the U.S.

I must, then, conclude that in the U.S., we have two Americas, and the one George W. Bush represents is the real American success story that exposes the key to achievement—not the content of ones character, but the coincidence of ones birth.

Writing in the New York Times, Susan Dynarski reports:

Rich and poor students don’t merely enroll in college at different rates; they also complete it at different rates. The graduation gap is even wider than the enrollment gap.

These sobering facts come from a longitudinal study and a connected report. And the data are stunning, but clear:

vantage of wealth in college — Source: Department of Education: Education Longitudinal Study

edu attainment distribution SES — SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002), Base Year and Third Follow-up. See Digest of Education Statistics 2014, table 104.91.

Further, Dynarski continues, and then concludes:

Academic skills in high school, at least as measured by a standardized math test, explain only a small part of the socioeconomic gap in educational attainment.

Here’s another startling comparison: A poor teenager with top scores and a rich teenager with mediocre scores are equally likely to graduate with a bachelor’s degree. In both groups, 41 percent receive a degree by their late 20s.

And even among the affluent students with the lowest scores, 21 percent managed to receive a bachelor’s degree, compared with just 5 percent of the poorest students. Put bluntly, class trumps ability when it comes to college graduation.

Poor students are increasingly falling behind well-off children in their test scores, as recent research by Sean Reardon at Stanford University shows.

That is, any poor children who manage to score at the top of the class are increasingly beating the odds. Yet even when they beat the odds in high school, they still must fight a new set of tough odds when it comes to completing college.

Steph Curry has gained a well-deserved high level of recognition as the NBA League MYV in the 2014-2015 season. Like Grant Hill, Curry is the black son of a successful and wealthy professional athlete.

Curry is recognized as a hard worker—practicing at rates and amounts that most people cannot comprehend.

An ideal role model for black males in the U.S.?

Not according to high school English teacher Matt Amaral, who recently posted Dear Steph Curry, Now That You Are MVP Please Don’t Come Visit My High School and asked of Curry: “But I have to ask you to do me a solid and make sure you don’t ever come visit my high school.”

Amaral is making a concession I have argued above.

Curry is an outlier, and the personification of a potentially corrosive promise: You can be anything if you just work hard enough.

Well, no, that isn’t true.

So those of us who are parents and educators are put in a truly ugly position.

I love to inspire and encourage young people. I dearly and deeply love young people.

But I also cringe at the adult proclivity to lie in order not to face themselves the ugly truths they create and perpetuate—often by refusing to face them.

There is tremendous value in hard work and effort for the sake of hard work and effort.

And, yes, the world should be a meritocracy, the world should be fair.

Pretending it is while it isn’t, wrapping our young in shallow feel-good slogans and stories—these are sure ways never to achieve the equity we say we love in the U.S.

If we do not want to tell students the real American success story—the one about winning the birth lottery—we damn well better do something to create a better story instead of continuing to lie to children and ourselves.

Because, as you know, it is entirely within your power to make things different, right?

Telling Poor, Smart Kids That All It Takes Is Hard Work to Be as Successful as Their Wealthy Peers Is a Blatant Lie, Taylor Gordon

Public Intellectual, Writing

Writing for the Public: A Framework

June 3, 2015 plthomasedd 4 Comments

In several undergraduate courses (a May course on education documentaries and first year seminars) and a graduate course (current trends in literacy) I teach, students write public pieces that challenges them to examine a common misconception and then help a general audience better understand the issue. The piece is created as an online document as well—requiring that students explore citing and supporting their claims with hyperlinks to credible and effective sources.

Having written public pieces in mainstream and alternative publications (The Conversation, AlterNet) regularly for over a decade and then writing online (in different types and for different venues) blogs for about five years, I have learned a great deal about writing from a specialized perspective for the public. As a university-based academic, I have also come to advocate that public work is at least as important for scholars as traditional publishing (peer-reviewed journals, books)—if not more important since the social/practical impact and scope of reach are often much greater for public work.

As a genre (commentary), a distinct medium (virtual/online), and advocacy, writing for the public is incredibly difficult and too often discouraging.

Primarily for K-12 teachers, academics, and scholars/researchers, this discussion of a framework for public writing also argues that we need more informed public voices—especially from educators, academics, and researchers.

Writing for the Public: A Framework

Public writing is an especially important genre of writing for stepping away from traditional views of essays and argumentation (as taught in formal schooling)—rejecting introduction (thesis), body, and conclusion templates; reconsidering paragraphing (short is better).

Openings (and even the title) of public works should seek to accomplish three goals (sometimes simultaneously): (1) engaging the reader by being interesting, (2) focusing the reader on the central topic and major claim of the piece, and (3) establishing for the reader your expertise or unique perspective related to the topic (consider that readers likely are reading you for the first time and have no context for your credibility).

For educators, academics, and scholars/researchers, public writing must purposefully and carefully recognize that popular perceptions about issues tend to be simplistic or even misinformed. That reality means the audience will be antagonistic and nearly impossible to sway.

Powerful examples of this for me has been writing about grade retention, corporal punishment, and the word gap. In all three situations, the evidence is overwhelming (or significantly complex, as with the research on literacy and social class) but also counter to popular beliefs.

For writers with expertise and experience in a field, public writing must remain constantly aware of that public while also navigating the high standards of traditional scholarship.

That means opening a public piece by being interesting can be accomplished by following a key guideline from Joseph Williams (Style): write with characters and plot. Readers are often interested in people doing things—narrative; and people are really interested in real people doing real things.

For teachers and professors, we can often share actual classroom stories, but public writing can also mine the rich world of journalism for real-world stories that accurately reflect the broader generalizations found in high-quality research.

Yes, qualitative data (narratives) can be outliers or misleading, but our job as experts is to choose and shape narratives that are representative, while also engaging the general public.

Within a few opening paragraphs, then, we want to engage and focus our readers while establishing our credibility; this is a much different and much harder task for a writer than the formulaic introduction/thesis.

Here, we need to acknowledge that public commentaries generally fall in a word-count range of about 750-1250 words (typically at the lower end). This is really brief for complex topics (ones that academics may cover in several 1000 words), and many feel writing public commentaries has more in common with writing poetry (concision, concision, concision) than other forms of prose.

I agree—since I am also a poet.

The bulk of your piece, however, must be the main claims, evidence (hyperlinked) and elaborations that constitute the body. In the body, typically you are challenged to make complicated and sometimes technical information accessible to the general public.

Word choice, sentence formation, use of evidence—these are the really hard parts of doing public writing (and these i no template). And while your evidence is essential, hyperlinks must be used as if readers will not follow them, and the credibility of the evidence (just as you do initially with yourself) must be established in a way that is compelling to the average (non-expert) reader.

And here is the truly frustrating part of public writing: although, for example, I noted that major medical organizations and the American Psychological Association all have clear stances against corporal punishment of any kind, much of the responses I have received completely ignore or even discount that evidence (evidence that in the academic world would carry a great deal of weight).

Since public pieces are brief, as well, your agenda is best served by having a clear major claim/argument and then a few supporting claims; keep the argument as simple as possible without being simplistic.

Just as a narrative is engaging as an opening, the bulk of your discussion must be carried by concrete and vivid details; always give the reader as many sensory triggers as possible (an old Flannery O’Connor rule about writing fiction, by the way).

Now, as we think about an ending, I want to make a counterintuitive claim: The traditional view of the essay (as we have been taught in formal schooling) includes that the body is the meat of an essay; thus, the part that matters most. However, in public writing, the opening captures the reader’s attentions, and then the ending leaves the reader with the impression that likely works or doesn’t in terms of making your case.

Instead of thinking about a conclusion as a restatement of the introduction (horrible advice, by the way, that serves no purpose in any type of writing), the ending often is most effective when you work on framing your argument.

Framing also depends heavily on the use of the concrete. Once you establish a story—or even a refrain—in your opening, you can return to that image, those people, that event, or the refrain in the final paragraph or two.

That motif, then, gives your piece coherence in the reader’s mind, establishing an internal logic to the piece that may have a stronger influence on the reader intuitively than the rational arguments of the body.

As a final point—something I stress to my students since their writing often will be evaluated, graded: work diligently to have a final few sentences, a final few words that are vivid and leave the reader with the new idea or new impression that is at the center of your argument.

“What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice,” explained George Orwell in “Why I Write,” adding, “I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

“The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us,” Orwell continued; however, “It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness.”

As educators, academics, and scholars/researchers, we are well prepared to tackle “the problem of truthfulness,” and if we the informed do not, we are leaving that important task to others less credible.

Capitalism, Poverty

The Inhumanity of Humanity: The Real American Value

May 31, 2015 plthomasedd 1 Comment

As I have detailed when examining science fiction (SF) and speculative fiction, the roots of my fascination with those genres include my mother’s love for science fiction as well as my journey from watching 1950s SF films and Shock Theater with her and then discovering my own foundational works, including the original Planet of the Apes films.

Two of the best moments for me as a parent were when I discovered my very young daughter watching over and over the video-taped Tim Burton Batman with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson and then Planet of the Apes films.

Since I love the original Planet of the Apes films, I have always been skeptical of the reboots, but when I watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I was pleasantly surprised—I think mostly because the technological advances that have made superhero-comics-to-films work also gave a new life to the Apes franchise.

None the less, even when mostly good, Hollywood films designed as blockbusters tend to have far more problems than I can stand.

A week or so ago, I noticed Dawn of the Planet of the Apes had come to my cable service and I caught it after more than 30 minutes in and while my granddaughter was visiting—so I actually only semi-watched some of the film.

My film-watching life has been limited now to cable film watching, but that facilitates my obsessive self—the urge to watch, re-watch, and re-watch films—often in pieces and out of order.

Tired after a hard cycling day in the late May heat of South Carolina, I noticed Dawn running again last night, and then an interesting coincidence occurred: I watched The Good Lie wrapped around the re-watching of Dawn.

Waiting for Dawn to start, I scrolled past Lie, pausing after reading the synopsis. I do not recall ever seeing Lie advertised and had also missed the controversy about the film, but I wondered how badly a Reese Witherspoon vehicle would mangle what appeared to be an important (and mostly ignored in the U.S.) consideration about the Sudan.

After ten or fifteen minutes, I had to switch to my full viewing of Dawn; however, after Dawn, I noticed Lie on a different time zone channel, resulting in my watching both mostly back to back.

Keeping in mind a strong caveat about popular films, I found Dawn to be quite good, and in many ways, Lie is horrible, inexcusably so.

Both films struggle (I think unconsciously) with the white savior motif that plagues Hollywood, and viewed together, the films are stained by sometimes gross stereotyping.

When the films are not simplistic (and when Lie isn’t muddled by a complete lack of control of tone), there are thematic moments shared between them that should not be ignored underneath all the faults.

Dawn shows the inhumanity of humanity, and Lie exposes the inhumanity of capitalism in the U.S.

Both messages are vivid, intense, and mostly accurate; but I suspect also missed by audiences.

Taken together, the films also dramatize the power of cultural norms to shape individual behavior—a story that refutes the rugged individualism narrative endorsed in the U.S. (and typical of U.S. films).

There is a nobility to Caesar (Dawn) and Jeremiah (Lie) that stands in stark contrast with the basic nature of humans (Dawn) and the capitalist ethic in the U.S. (Lie).

Caesar is forced to break and twist his dictum when Caesar kills Koba (the ape embodiment of human nature):

Koba: Apes not kill apes.

Caesar: You are no ape.

And Jeremiah must choose between his own need to work and his ethical code when faced with a grocery store throwing away food and refusing to give that food to the needy:

Nick: What are you doing?

Jeremiah: It is a sin not to give to those in need.

Nick: According to who?

Jeremiah: Jeremiah.

Nick: And who is that?

Jeremiah: [turning in his apron] Me. My name is Jeremiah.

I suppose if nothing else, popular films have their moments when they are so simple even a child can see the messages: Caesar is more humane, more human than the humans, and Jeremiah is more Christlike than the citizens of a so-called Christian nation.

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In his 2013 speech about reading and libraries, writer Neil Gaiman could just as easily been talking about the possible consequences of all art:

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

You’re also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it’s this:

THE WORLD DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS. THINGS CAN BE DIFFERENT.

He then explains about fiction:

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

And these words ring true in the wake of my having watched a mostly good film (Dawn) and an often really bad one (Lie) that both demand of the audience: “The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.”

Humbly, I would add: If we truly were discontent with this world we have created.

And with deep regret, I must conclude that we can tolerate things being different only in these Other Worlds, but not right here in the real world—one in which we are content with pervasive human-made violence and grocery stores that throw away food while the undeserving poor go hungry because that is what the market demands.

publication, Writing

Advice for Submitting Work for Publication

May 29, 2015 plthomasedd 1 Comment

While I have blogged before about submitting work as a student and author, I want to focus here on submitting work for publication in academic, scholarly, or professional venues, especially work submitted by K-12 teachers and university scholars.

For those new to submitting work for publication, an important first step is understanding academic and professional publishing. Academic/professional journals and books are edited and managed often by teachers and professors who are rarely paid for that work, and thus, must edit and manage along with maintaining their full-time academic work.

IMPORTANT: Submit your work in such a way that you honor the time and professionalism of the editor(s).

What does that entail?

Do your homework. Before submitting, and even before writing your submission, read and carefully consider the publication (journal) or publisher (books) for which you are seeking publication. You should read and familiarize yourself with the work of the editor(s) as well.

Especially if you are submitting to a journal, read and analyze several recent works in the journal or column you are targeting. Journals and columns can change significantly under different editors, so “recent” is key.

Draft with the publication in mind. Writing your submission must include maintaining a focus on the journal, column, or book call for manuscripts. Original pieces drafted after seeing the call or revising/reshaping existing work (such as a thesis or dissertation completed for degree work) must be crafted to fulfill the call focus and guidelines, including conforming to the word count.

Never submit a thesis/dissertation excerpt or manuscript for publication without revising/reshaping the work to meet the call you are targeting.

Format manuscript to citation/publication specifications. Two important points here: (1) manuscripts must be formatted and texts cited properly (impeccably), and (2) formatting should honor “less is always better.”

Formatting your Word document should conform to some standard guidelines:

Use Times New Roman (or similar standard font—although never submit a work with different fonts in body, headers, etc.) and 12 pt. font; double space throughout with the standard 1/2″ indent for paragraphing and 1″ (or per style sheet) margins.
Use appropriate header/footer requirements of style sheet identified by publication, but avoid decorative formatting of headers/footers (lines, images, etc.). Editors want and need clean files. All submitted work will be reformatted if published so your decorations are time wasting. (Don’t use italics, bold, or quote marks unless necessary—as in proper formatting required by the style sheet identified. Quote marks should never be used for emphasis.)
Note proper formatting for your title, subheads (academic/professional writing tends to have subheads), and references. Take great care not to mix citation conventions for levels of headings and designation of citations as well as the listing of sources (such as the use of footnotes/endnotes, in-text citations, and heading for references). Typically citation generating software or apps should be avoided since they are often flawed and also embed formatting that can be problematic.
Be sure to use your word processor appropriately. Know how to format paragraph indentations, hanging indents (citations), and block quotes with the ruler or menu options (and not manually with Return>Tab).
Include your name (as it should be once published) and contact information on the manuscript as noted in the publication guidelines. Also, be sure to have a reliable email address that you check often.

In academic/professional publishing, there simply is not room for muddled citation and documentation formatting. Yes, the many and varied style sheets are mind-numbing (APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard), and the odd changes publications will make to those standards are a maze (use MLA but also for this publication …), but citation conventions constitute a significant part of the professionalism of your work.

Check, double-check, and have a peer check your citations—the consistency, accuracy, and formatting.

Submit a clean document. Submitted manuscripts send a powerful message to editor(s). Sloppy manuscripts (poorly copyedited, mangled formatting, improper citation, active track changes/comments) suggest the writer isn’t serious and the piece isn’t ready for consideration (note the “honor the time and professionalism of the editor(s)” above).

Rolling over a manuscript from one submission to another can be a problem if you are not careful to fully revise and reformat a piece. Never submit with the caveat you’ll properly revise to fit the guidelines if accepted.

Here, again, asking a colleague to read for edits is essential.

Make your contact with the editor(s) count. The actual submission of the work is a last and important step. Use email or postal as required, but make sure that the file or hard copy conforms exactly to the publication requirement (many publications have limits on Word file types; some hard copy submissions must have multiple copies included; and always note the guidelines for cover page and author identification on the manuscript).

Since most submissions are now electronic (either by email or through a submission system), be sure to name the electronic manuscript file as required (or if no requirements, be simple and practical, such as naming the file your name), put required or practical information in the “subject” line (if no requirement, your last name and call date/topic are helpful), and include a brief but effective cover letter.

The cover letter should, again, consider the time and professionalism of the editor(s)—so brief is excellent. However, be sure to include the title of your piece, the call topic/date you are addressing, and then a few details that may help your piece:

Note your professional context and why this piece is something only you could have written or is credible because of your background/expertise.
Identify your understanding of the publication by referencing a previous article, another work by the publisher, and/or some relevant work by the editor. These must be sincere gestures of your having researched the publications, however, and are not intended as merely cozying up to the editor.
Include any required information from the call, and verify you are available by a reliable email address.
If your submission is in any way unlike what the publication tends to accept or varies from the call in some significant way, you should note those differences with a brief explanation of why you think they are justified.

Blanch Dubois relied on the kindness of strangers. In academic/professional publishing, mutual kindness is a must.

Those submitting work should do so with the labor and time of the editor(s) in mind, and then the editor(s) must handle those submissions with the sort of care she/he/they would appreciate.

CCSS, race

The Unintended (and Mostly Ignored) Lesson of Common Core: Race Inequity

May 28, 2015 plthomasedd Leave a comment

You would be well advised to read Andre Perry’s examination of Common Core and race, carefully and possibly more than once: How Common Core serves white folks a sliver of the black experience.

I would also like to draw your attention to two key points that may get lost in the provocative and powerful crux of Perry’s piece:

I simply can’t manufacture the passion for or against curricula reboots or changes that eventually must happen. I’m sure there’s someone still lobbying for Home Economics as a required course, but gladly most have progressed. The researcher in me can’t argue against wanting a better means to measure educational performance nationwide. However, having the ability to compare performances among groups hasn’t brought educational justice to black and brown students [emphasis added]. Still, I know that kids overcome….

As Sen. Lamar Alexander-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. rewrite No Child Left Behind, they must consider giving teachers the freedom to teach while providing consequences to those districts and schools that don’t provide the education all students deserve [emphasis added].

Finally, I want to make two responses to Perry’s piece—with the caveat that I am not suggesting my perspective is better but that I have held nuanced differences with some of the important issues Perry is raising.

First, unlike Perry, I do not support Common Core because I do not support any standards changes as well as the inevitable high-stakes testing standards-based reform produce because—as Perry himself notes above—standards and high-stakes testing have not (and will/can not) create the equity in education all children deserve.

And finally, I am an advocate for the inverse of what Perry has scathingly recognized about the backlash against Common Core: “Common Core is serving white folks a sliver of the black experience.”

Education reform needs to make two dramatic shifts: (1) Commit to social reform first, and then (2) address equity of opportunity for all students (again, as Perry notes above).

My grand plan would be not that we subject privileged children (mostly white) to the horribly inadequate and criminally reduced educational experiences that have failed black and brown children for decades, but that we grant black and brown children the dignity they deserve by guaranteeing them the rich and rewarding educational experiences that privileged children have received on top of their privileged lives for decades as well.

As Perry highlights:

Black, brown and poor people take tests every single day. Confrontations with police, hunger, unemployment and biased teachers overshadow the feelings of taking computerized tests. Low expectations, a lack of inclusion, a leaky teacher pipeline for communities of color, and punishing disciplinary policies [hyperlink added] all threaten authentic learning and teaching more than PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests ever will.

For good reason, people in the ’hood have always been more worried with how test results are used.

It is no flippant call to say that all black and brown children deserve the schooling Barack Obama’s daughter have—and not the abusive and insulting “no excuses” charter schools many now must endure.

Ultimately, any aspect of the Common Core debate is an inexcusable distraction—”it’s easier to shout down Common Core than battle for a viable solution to our accountability problem,” Perry acknowledges—and it is thus vital that we open our eyes as Perry demands we do.

Barbara Kingsolver, Kurt Vonnegut, Writing

Writing, Unteachable or Mistaught?

May 27, 2015 plthomasedd 13 Comments

Let’s not tell them what to write.
Lou LaBrant, The Psychological Basis for Creative Writing (1936)

Kurt Vonnegut was a genre-bending writer and a Freethinker, a lonely pond fed by the twin tributaries of atheism and agnosticism. So it is a many-layered and problematic claim by Vonnegut, also a writing teacher, that writing is “unteachable,” but “something God lets you do or declines to let you do.”

This nod to the authority of God, I think, is more than a typical Vonnegut joke (the agnostic/atheist writer citing God) as it speaks to a seemingly endless debate over the five-paragraph essay, which has resurfaced on the NCTE Connected Community.

To investigate the use of the five-paragraph template as well as prompted writing as dominant practices for teaching writing in formal schooling to all children, I want to begin by exploring my own recent experience co-writing a chapter with a colleague and also couch the entire discussion in a caution raised by Johnson, Smagorinsky, Thompson, and Fry: “Just as we hope that teachers do not oversimplify issues of form, we hope that critics do not oversimplify intentions of the legions of teachers who take this approach” (p. 171).

Writers and People Who Write

My colleague Mike Svec and I are working on a chapter in a volume, and we are examining our work as teacher educators who have working-class backgrounds.

Mike is an academic who occasionally writes. I am a writer who happens to be an academic.

And therein lies a problem for our work as co-writers. Mike spends a great deal of time mulling, reading, planning, and fretting (my word) before committing anything to the virtual page.

I write as part of my brainstorming, and fill up the virtual page so I will have something to wrestle with, revise, reshape and even abandon.

Filling up virtual paper is Mike’s late stage. Filling up virtual paper is my first stage.

This experience has highlighted for me two important points:

Most people (students and academics/teachers included) are not writers, but people who occasionally write (and then, that occasion is often under some compelling requirement and not the “choice” of the person writing).
Especially people who occasionally write, and then most often under that compelling reason or situation, suffer from an inordinate sense of paralysis (I am going to argue further below) because they have been mistaught how to write (predominantly by template and prompt).

Since most teachers of English/ELA and any discipline in which the teacher must teach writing are themselves not writers, the default approach to writing is at least informed by if not couched in Mike’s view of writing—one that has been fostered by template and prompted writing instruction (the authoritarian nod in Vonnegut invoking God above).

And this is my big picture philosophical and pedagogical problem with depending on the five-paragraph essay as the primary way in which we teach students to write: Visual art classes that aim to teach students to paint do not use paint-by-numbers to prepare novices to be artists, and I would argue, that is because those teachers are themselves artists (not teachers who occasionally paint).

However, most teachers of writing in all disciplines are themselves not writers, but teachers who occasionally (or in the past occasionally) write (wrote).

Why Scripts, Templates, and Prompts Fail Students and Writing

In a graduate summer course for English/ELA teachers, I had the students read a commentary by Mike Royko (syndicated columnist) on flag burning. I asked them to mark the parts of the essay and underline the thesis as they read.

And these students who were also teachers dutifully did so.

Royko’s piece in most ways does not conform to the five-paragraph essay, but the teachers marked and labeled an introduction, body, and conclusion—underlining a sentence as the thesis. They immediately imposed onto the essay the script they taught their students (the script they were taught).

When we shared, they noticed differences in their labeling and marking. Most notable was the thesis: Royko’s piece is a snarky, sarcastic commentary that directly states support for flag burning laws but in fact rejects flag burning laws by sarcastic implication.

As a consequence, no direct thesis exists—although we can fairly paraphrase one.

I continue to use examples such as this with first-year students to investigate and challenge templates for essays they have been taught (for example, essays by Barbara Kingsolver) in order to work toward what Johns calls “genre awareness” instead of “genre acquisition.”

Yes, essays have openings that tend to focus the reader, but most openings are primarily concerned with grabbing and maintaining the reader’s interest. And openings are typically far more than one paragraph (essays have paragraphs of many different lengths as well, some as brief as one word or sentence).

Essays then proceed in many different ways—although guided by concepts such as cohesion and purpose.

And then, essays end some way, a way I would argue that is not “restate your introduction in different words” (the Kingsolver essay linked above frames the essay on attitudes toward children with an opening and then closing personal narrative about Spain).

Ultimately, the five-paragraph essay allows both teachers and students to avoid the messy and complicated business that is writing—many dozens of choices with purpose and intent.

Scripts, templates, and prompts do most of the work for student—leaving them almost no opportunities to experiment with the writer’s craft, whether that be in the service of history, science, or any other discipline. Without purposeful practice in the business of writing (making purposeful decisions while implementing the writer’s genre awareness against the constraints of the writing expectations), students (and even academics) are often left in some degree of paralysis when asked to perform authentically as writers.

As Zach Weiner’s comic succinctly illustrates, the five-paragraph template/script and writing prompt serve greater ease in assigning and grading writing (absolving the writing teacher of having expertise and experience as a writer, in fact), but as the student in the comic declares: “Suddenly I hate writing.”

And as Jennifer Gray details:

[M]any of [the students] checked out of the writing process and merely performed for the teacher. Their descriptions about their writing lack enthusiasm and engagement; instead, they reflect obedience and resignation. That is not the kind of writer I want in my classes; I want to see students actively engaged with their work, finding value and importance in the work.

•

As much as I love Vonnegut, I disagree about writing being unteachable. And his own role as mainly a writer who occasionally taught writing presents another lesson:

Nothing is known about helping real writers to write better. I have discovered almost nothing about it during the past two years. I now make to my successor at Iowa a gift of the one rule that seemed to work for me: Leave real writers alone.

Well, yes, we do know quite a great deal about teaching writing—and we have for many decades. So if “leave them alone” means do not use artificial scripts, I am all in, but certainly developing writers of all ages can be fostered directly by the teacher.

I am left to worry, then, that the main problem we have with teaching writing is that for too long, we have mistaught it as people who occasionally write, and not as writers and as teachers.

This is a herculean ask, of course, that we be writers and teachers.

But for the many who do not now consider themselves writers but must teach writing, it is the opportunity to begin the journey to being a writer with students by committing to genre awareness instead of genre acquisition.

Awareness comes from investigating the form you wish to produce (not imposing a template onto a form or genre). Investigate poetry in order to write poetry; investigate essays in order to write essays.

But set artificial and simplistic templates and scripts aside so that you and your students can see the form you wish to write.

Kingsolver’s warning about child rearing also serves us well as teachers lured by the Siren’s song of the five-paragraph essay: “Be careful what you give children, or don’t, for sooner or later you will always get it back.”

reading

Beware Grade-Level Reading and the Cult of Proficiency

May 24, 2015 plthomasedd 10 Comments

[Header Photo by Chidy Young on Unsplash}

Few issues in education seem more important or more universally embraced (from so-called progressive educators to right-wing politicians such as Jeb Bush) than the need to have all children reading on grade level—specifically by that magical third grade:

Five years ago, communities across the country formed a network aimed at getting more of their students reading proficiently by the end of 3rd grade. States, cities, counties, nonprofit organizations, and foundations in 168 communities, spread across 41 states and the District of Columbia, are now a part of that initiative, the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading.

However, advocating that all students must read at grade level—often defined as reading proficiency—rarely acknowledges the foundational problems with those goals: identifying text by a formula claiming “grade level” and then identifying children as readers by association with those readability formulas.

This text, some claim, is a fifth-grade text, and thus children who can “read” that text independently are at the fifth-grade reading level.

While all this seems quite scientific and manageable, I must call hokum—the sort of technocratic hokum that daily ruins children as readers, under-prepares children as literate and autonomous humans, and further erodes literacy as mostly testable literacy.

So who does this grade-level reading and proficiency benefit?

First, lets consider what anyone means by “reading.” For the sake of discussion, this is oversimplified, but I think, not distorting to the point of misleading. Reading may be essentially decoding, pronouncing words, phrases, and clauses with enough fluency to give the impression of understanding. Reading may be comprehension, strategies and then behaviors or artifacts by a reader that mostly represent (usually in different and fewer words) an accurate or mostly accurate, but unqualified, restating of the original text.

But reading may also (I would add should) be critical literacy, the investigating of text that moves beyond comprehension and places both text and “meaning” in the dynamic of reader, writer, and text (Rosenblatt) as well as how that text is bound by issues of power while also working against the boundaries of power, history, and the limitations of language.

In that framing, then, grade-level reading and proficiency are trapped mostly at decoding and comprehension, promoting the argument that all meaning is in the text only (a shared but anemic claim of New Criticism).

This narrow and inadequate view of text and reading (and readers) serves authoritarian approaches to teaching and mechanistic structures of testing, and more broadly, reducing text and reading to mere technical matters serves mostly goals of surveillance and control.

Consider first the allure of formula that masks the arbitrary nature of formula. Plug “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams into a readability calculator—first in its poetic format of lines and stanzas, and then as a grammatical sentence.

As a poem, apparently, the text is about 4th grade, but as a sentence, nearly 9th grade.

The problem is that readability formulas and claims of “grade level” are entirely the function of the limitations of math (the necessity to quantify and then the byproduct of honoring only that which can be quantified)—counting word syllables, number of words in sentences.

Reducing text to numbers, reducing students to numbers—both perpetuate a static and thus false view of text and reading. “Meaning” is not static, but temporal, shifting, and more discourse or debate than pronouncement.

“The Red Wheelbarrow” is really “easy” to read, both aloud and to comprehend. But readability formulas address nothing about genre or form, nothing about the rich intent of the writer (for example, poetry often presents only a small fraction of the larger context), nothing about all that that various readers bring to the text.

And to the last point, when we confront reading on grade level or reading proficiency, we must begin to unpack how and why any reader is investigating a text.

As I have detailed, we can take a children’s picture book—which by all technical matters is at primary or elementary grade levels—and add complex lenses of analysis, rendering the same text extremely complex—with a meaning that is expanding instead of static and singular.

Text complexity, readers’ grade level, and concurrent hokum such as months or years of learning are the grand distractions of technocrats: “it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing” (The Tragedy of Macbeth, 5, 5).

Grand pronouncements about grade-level reading and proficiency, then, benefit politicians, textbook companies, and the exploding testing industry. But not children, not literacy, and not democracy.

Leveled books, labeled children, and warped education policy (grade retention based on high-stakes testing) destroy reading and the children advocates claim to be serving.

Thus, alas, there is simply no reading crisis and no urgency to have students on grade level, by third or any grade.

The cult of proficiency and grade-level reading is simply the lingering “cult of efficiency” that plagues formal education in the U.S.—quantification for quantification’s sake, children and literacy be damned.