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/).
As a writer (and teacher), I am humbled and grateful for you, the readers. So here as a “thank you” more than anything else are my top posts of 2014 (modified as a Top 10, which is more than 10 because I list the actual top 10 of 2014 and expand to include top 10 published in 2014).
And for 2015, I sincerely wish for all, peace & happiness. Let’s see what we all can do to make that happen for others and ourselves.
Rain and cold at the beginning of my holiday break this late December forced me onto the bicycle trainer, something I loath doing. But to off-set that torture, I was pleased to find Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind(2004), one of my short list of favorite movies that I watch over and over: Blade Runner(1982), Solaris(2002), Lost Highway(1997).
These films draw me in part because of genre—surrealism, fantasy, science fiction—and the allure of considering alternate worlds, alternate consciousness, alternate minds. But there are thematic threads pulling these films together as well.
The folding of time, or the urge and then opportunity to relive, revisit opportunities; questions about reality and what constitutes basic humanity (specifically the human mind and will/spirit); the complicated relationship/tension with each person between mind and heart—these are dramatized and personified in those films in ways that continue to help me wrestle with those realities, but also imagine beyond this temporal existence that is inevitably linear and cumulative.
As a university professor, I am each semester reminded of how perception shapes reality when I read my student feedback forms, almost always including both a few students who think I am the best professor ever and a few students who think I was pure torture and failure. In the same course, the same classroom.
As a parent, I experienced similar swings from my daughter’s own perception of me, especially in those volatile teen years.
Few things sting, hurt as much as disappointing those you love, care for, or are seeking to do nothing except the best in their interests.
I still flinch a bit each time (and it happens regularly) students inform me that I seem “mean,” that students are “afraid of me.” How, o how, could I have possibly sent such completely opposite messages?
But another pattern found especially in the Spider-Man narrative is the contrast between what Peter Parker/Spider-Man intends and how Spider-Man is perceived. The graphic novel Death of the Stacys collects The Amazing Spider-Man #s 88-92, 121-122, combining the deaths of Captain Stacy and his daughter/Peter’s girlfriend Gwen. The stories are about the collateral damage of vigilante justice.
After Captain Stacy’s death, the public and Gwen begin to view Spider-Man as the villain, and thus, Peter’s internal struggle over great power/great responsibility is magnified by the social construction of him as evil.
Since I have just finished a semester, I am typically concerned about what students I have failed to reach as I intended, which students are apt to see the professor I never intended to be. This cycle is very powerful in teaching, and although somewhat anxiety triggering, it also helps drive me to be a better teacher next time; teaching affords us those opportunities of another chance without having to be in a dystopian future or a mind-bending David Lynch nightmare.
This winter of 2014, however, has offered me the most significant moment yet in terms of having another chance: my granddaughter, who has recently begun to look at me (and everything) quite intensely.
I have, then, begin to contemplate what she will come to think of me—who will I be in here eyes?
I still walk extremely fast—I do almost everything extremely fast—and I admit to having raced through much of my 20s, 30s, and 40s (sometimes dragging my daughter along the way).
A granddaughter’s five-month-old stare has made the world slow down, some, or at least those eyes have asked of me: Who do I think I am? Who do I want to be? (Yes, these existential questions remain throughout our lives; they are not things to be answered in youth.)
In my advancing age, I am more capable (I hope) and at least more aware that there isn’t necessarily a tension between who we are and who others think we are/want us to be but the need to negotiate those parallel realities.
I will continue to gift myself re-watching the films I love, re-reading the books that move me, but through those, I hope to live better, recognizing that today is the only today I will have, and then tomorrow—not as an act of regret but as an act of being fully human.
The Epilogue in The Amazing Spider-Man #122 is one page of nine panels. In the wake of Gwen’s death, for which he feels responsible, Peter Parker lashes out at Mary Jane, who turns to leave but in the final three wordless panels (except for the onomatopoeia “click” in the final panel) she closes the door and turns back to Peter.
Mary Jane is looking at the distraught Peter. In her eyes, he is worth it.
I think that is what we are hoping for from the ones we love. I think that is what is ours to offer.
Technically, in order to celebrate the first black Captain America, we’d have to resort to the sort of contortions common in the comic book universe—the time machine.
Truth: Red, White & Black was a seven-issue series in 2003 with, yes, a black Captain America [1], as Joshua Yehl noted when the more recent announcement of a black Captain America surfaced: “While it is notable that this will be a black Captain America, it turns out that he’s not the first. Isaiah Bradley was not only the first black Captain America, but he held the mantle even before Steve Rogers.”
But the comic book universe is also noted for acting as if the same-old-same-old is NEW!!! for decades—with reboots (and more reboots), renumbering long-standing titles, killing superheroes, having those superheroes’ sidekicks take over for the dead superheroes, and then resurrecting the superheroes.
Tonight on The Colbert Report, Marvel Comics’ Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada revealed that the new Captain America is Sam Wilson aka The Falcon.
With Steve Rogers losing his super powers in the pages of his solo series written by Rick Remender, readers have been guessing who the new Captain America would be, and now we have our answer. General audiences will recognize Falcon from this summer’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie with Anthony Mackie playing the winged superhero.
The new Captain America by Stuart Immonen
A few aspects of this move to have a black Captain America are worth noting. First, as the announcement above shows, Marvel’s commitment to films is significantly impacting their comics.
My serious comic book collecting years were mainly in the 1970s, and I was drawn always to Captain America because The Falcon was one of my favorite characters. The series featured The Falcon by name and image on each issue’s cover for most of the 1970s, in fact.
Captain America #180 (Dec. 1974). Art by Gil Kane and Frank Giacoia.
My teenaged self lurking below a few decades of the 50+ self is, then, quite excited about Sam Wilson/Captain America; however, that adolescent nerd-glee is significantly tempered by the social justice adult I have become, leaving me to ask: Should we marvel at a black Captain America?
Captain America #25 opens with Steve Rogers remembering Sam Wilson—Wilson’s warrior nature, his losing both parents (minister and community organizer) and raising a brother and sister, his resilience in the face of prejudice. Notably as well, Sam Wilson was, according to Rogers, “just a man. A man dedicated to showing what one person could accomplish after a lifetime of misfortune.”
Too often, comic book narratives remain firmly entrenched in the cliche (of course, if your audience is primarily children/teens, most anything can seem new to them, and is), but where comic book narratives have failed over about eight decades is that they mostly reflect social norms, even the biases and stereotypes (see Hugh Ryan on Wonder Woman), uncritically.
Readers in the first pages of issue #25 are led to believe (as the surrounding superheroes do) that Wilson has died heroically—and Rogers is about to pronounce Wilson a martyr. Until Wilson speaks.
The issue then turns to the aging Steve Rogers, no longer invigorated by super-soldier serum, who speaks to The Avengers in order to announce Sam Wilson/Captain America. This reboot ends with Wilson/Captain America in a hybrid uniform—red, white, and blue, Captain’s shield, and Falcon wings—shouting, “Avengers assemble!”
The All-New Captain America #1, interestingly, comes in a variant edition—all-white cardboard cover with only the title blazoned across the top. And with a somber and powerful opening page in which Sam Wilson recalls his father’s sermons and death, and his mother’s murder soon after, building to a refrain alluding the Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, the black Captain America takes flight.
I mentioned Wonder Woman above because I am now reading Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman. If Wonder Woman was born out of the rise of twentieth century feminism, as Lepore details, and then the series itself in action and image contradicts those feminist ideals, what good a female superhero?
And there I am stuck about the black Captain America, built up in Captain America #25 as the rugged individual, the exceptional human (superhuman) who lifted himself up by the bootstraps (wings didn’t hurt, there) and overcame every obstacle, including racism.
There is no evidence that black people are less responsible, less moral, or less upstanding in their dealings with America nor with themselves. But there is overwhelming evidence that America is irresponsible, immoral, and unconscionable in its dealings with black people and with itself. Urging African-Americans to become superhuman is great advice if you are concerned with creating extraordinary individuals. It is terrible advice if you are concerned with creating an equitable society. The black freedom struggle is not about raising a race of hyper-moral super-humans. It is about all people garnering the right to live like the normal humans they are.
If a black Captain America reinforces the “terrible advice” confronted by Coates, if black Captain American continues to perpetuate crass militarism and unbridled vigilante violence, I am left to ask, what good a black superhero?
Risking hyperbole, I believe Spider-Man saved my life, much like Max Dillon/Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2—except mine was metaphorical.
Watching the sequel of the 2012 reboot that had the cinematic guts to replicate possibly the most important moment in the Spider-Man Universe (and even the entire Marvel Universe)—“The Night Gwen Stacy Died”—I was powerfully forced into two minds paralleling the Peter Parker/Spider-Man duality: my 53-year-old academic mind as it interacted with my teenaged self, a traumatic period in the 1970s when I found myself strapped into a full body brace in hopes I could overcome scoliosis without major back surgery.
In the summer of 1975, I was diagnosed with scoliosis, a medical shock tossed on top of my frail self-concept wallowing in the typical throes of adolescence. I was scrawny, and I was destined not to become the strapping young male and athlete I believed my father wanted. And then, scoliosis—a curving spine and an affliction mostly common among females.
Perfect.
The body brace I wore was a torture device of straps, metal rods, and a solid plastic body mold, designed to force my spine straight so that the defective vertebrae could regain their proper shape. Wearing the brace 23 of 24 hours a day was how I spent my ninth grade, an adventure horrifying all on its own without the brace waving out to everyone, “Hey, look at the nerdy cripple kid!”
And then there was Spider-Man.
My wonderful parents not only sacrificed financially for the brace and seemingly never-ending visits to the orthopedist, but also scrambled to find anything that would help off-set what they must have recognized as a significant blow to who I was becoming, how I saw myself.
The saving choice was comic books. And to this day, I cannot set aside how hard that must have been for my very-1950s, rugged, working-class father, a four-sport athlete in high school who lost all of his teeth to sport and fights before graduation.
At first, I began buying comics mostly to stand at the long bar separating our kitchen/living room and draw (starting with tracing, and then freehand with pencil followed by teaching myself how to ink those pencil drawings as comic book artists did).
Drawing led to reading and reading, to collecting. One of our spare bedrooms became my comic book room, and I even built a chest to hold my comics in my ninth-grade wood working class at school.
Those familiar with Peter Parker/Spider-Man likely already anticipate what had to happen; I fell in love with Spider-Man comics—the Holy Grail of low self-esteem nerd superhero mythologies.
Science nerd, orphaned, painfully thin and wearing glasses, Peter Parker walked into my life both as a stark reflection of my Self and a promise that transformation was possible (although with a price). But in 1975, I was dropped into the post-Gwen Stacy world of Peter Parker/Spider-Man, but that was about to change.
“The Night Gwen Stacy Died”
As my comic book fascination grew, somehow my father was snagged in the collecting bug, taking me to the local pharmacies and quick shops in my small hometown that carried comics and even to one comic book convention in Atlanta, GA. But he also noticed comic collections being sold in the ads of the newspaper.
Over two visits spurred by the ad of a 20-something still living at home but obviously making a decision to shift into adulthood, we bought about 1000 comics, essentially a complete run of Marvel comics spanning most of the 1970s.
Sorting, cataloguing, and carefully placing each comic in the prerequisite plastic bags of true comic book nerdom—these were my solitude. I also ravenously began to piece together the Peter Parker/Spider-Man Universe, significantly the death of Gwen Stacy.
In The Power of Myth, an interview between Bill Moyers and popular comparative religion guru Joseph Campbell, I came to understand many years later the mythological patterns in superhero comics and the science fiction I would also begin to consume.
Throughout 30-plus years of teaching, I have grown more and more fascinated with genre and form; and as a reader, I can now trace my early comic book love that fed into Arthur C. Clarke to the logical path through Kurt Vonnegut and Margaret Atwood, leading then to Neil Gaiman and Haruki Murakami.
Mine is the story of the power of secular mythology—as Campbell may explain, the Truth beyond the narrative that need not be factually true (in contrast to the literalist Christianity of my Southern childhood).
The updating of the Gwen Stacy arc (set in contemporary times, for example) hurts my soul, but I found the film ambitious for remaining true to the only conclusion possible in the Peter Parker/Spider-Man narrative, the death of Gwen Stacy.
Peter Parker/Spider-Man has always been a bit about working-class insecurity, but the current-Me feels deeply uncomfortable about the failures in the original Silver Age arcs absent sophisticated portrayals of race and gender (the latter captured in the character of Gwen Stacy, blonde, pretty, and more Ideal than person).
I want to set aside, however, a critical re-reading of Spider-Man to embrace again why I believe the myth remains enduring and ultimately important, despite the many flaws.
Peter Parker/Spider-Man is grounded in the central superhero motif of duality: the mere human and the masked superhero.
Spider-Man grew out of the seminal Marvel method—personified by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby—of collaborative creation and genre blurring (superhero, romance, science fiction, fantasy, etc.).
As the domain of child, teen, and young adult males, comic books from Marvel in the 1960s succeeded by tapping into teenage angst and alienation, relationships, and the transition from formal school to work.
The duality motif in Spider-Man is about much more than hiding Peter behind a mask. Peter the nerd, before the spider bite, was lonely and alienated; and then, Peter Parker (Spider-Man) discovers over and over that he remains lonely and alienated because of not his super powers, but his great responsibility.
Silver Age Spider-Man, from the origin in 1962 until the death of Gwen Stacy in 1973, confronts the mythology of the individual heart in battle with that individual’s social responsibility.
Despite all the villains the Marvel bullpen could muster, Peter Parker’s greatest battle has always been with himself.
And the one moment that matters above all others is captured in a way that sequential art demands:
Gwen Stacy’s death in The Amazing Spider-Man 121-122 (June/July 1973)
The Peter Parker/Gwen Stacy storyline—for all the camp and flaws—remains in mythological terms a disturbing and fatalistic story of the sacrifice of the individual heart against our obligations, about the limitations of the human need to connect and then protect.
As a parent/grandparent and teacher, I lay on the couch and re-watched The Amazing Spider-Man 2through layers of me and then tears because I have lived and live a very real battle with myself that is our essential humanity: how do we follow our hearts and offer those we love and world the selflessness it deserves?
Beneath the mask of superhero lies a secular myth of duality that is each one of us, a calling not for superheroes but every human. All of which we can find in classic mythology about gods and humans.
In Peter Parker’s universe, Gwen Stacy had to die, and then die again in the re-imagined universe of film.
Gwen Stacy’s neck breaking is the frailty of human limitation, ironically, at the end of a web—Gwen’s own mortality as that intersects with Peter’s humanity, even as Spider-Man.
My penciled and inked drawing from my adolescence.
In existential terms, our passions are our suffering—the essential duality of being human.
As we watch Peter Parker fight himself, it is ours to recognize that to avoid our passions is to avoid living, to avoid the very humanity that should be our joy.
Max Dillon/Electro fumbles badly the gift of being saved by Spider-Man; I continue to try to find ways to serve it well (parenting, grand-parenting, teaching), although I do so in the only way a human can—I race forward, I trip, I pause on the ground, and then I stand again, committed to doing better this next time.
The Christmas season has always been the lowest point of the year for me. It has taken years and years to figure out all the elements, and coming to understand hasn’t really changed anything, except for recognizing why, unlike the majority of people being festive, I suffer the gray weeks around Christmas and New Year’s, longing for the other side.
The contracting of daylight toward the Winter Solstice, the rise of holiday gatherings, the interruption of the glorious and predictable pattern of the work schedule, and the pervasive sense of being always the stranger in the room—all this conspires against my proclivities toward introversion, anxiety, and the solitary demands of books and writing.
And this holiday season of 2014 has inevitably tumbled onto me like a load of bricks, triggered by worrying (my daughter sick one night, the mother of my five-month-old granddaughter, thus double worry) and then the stiff neck spawned like a Medieval belief.
However, as I mentioned above, my world is not the same as any other year before because my daughter has gifted me and the world a child, my granddaughter.
My daughter has taught me a great deal about myself—often those things that I would have preferred not to learn—and then after sitting in the delivery room watching her give birth followed by the past five months of her being a mother, wife, and daughter, she has again left me in awe (something she has done often before as baby, child, teen).
Because of me (and all her family, of course) and often in spite of me , she is the adult all parents both imagine and cannot imagine their child becoming.
Middle-age, an adult daughter, a grandchild, and over thirty years of teaching—these are the sorts of things that we must not ignore; the sorts of lessons that call out to us and offer us every single day yet another chance to do this only life right.
And so in the midst of my holiday blues, against the contortions of anxiety and the overwhelming urge to seek anywhere except here (when here includes people), and in defiance of my inherent pessimism, my granddaughter without the capacity for language yet speaks to me, provokes me, reminds me.
While I admit to flaws and significant, too frequent disappointment in my own Self, I also truly embrace the thing that grounds me most: each child, each student is a sacred trust.
Those anchors my daughter and granddaughter are joined in my life by that wonderful and demanding renewal known to teachers as students.
Once our student, always our student, and until that last class I mostly try not to think about, these students will be followed by new students—the bittersweet end of one semester or course replaced by the possibilities of that next semester, that next course, that room of students ours.
My granddaughter now helps me hold onto why I teach, why I live: every day, every moment, and every student, a new opportunity to be the person I want to be, to be a better person, one who can always look her in the eyes.
It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine). R.E.M.
The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now. James Baldwin
Speaking as a witness from within the bowels of the Ronald Reagan administration when President Reagan gave the committee responsible for A Nation at Risk their prime directives, Gerald Holton ended with Reagan’s emphatic “And please abolish that abomination, the Department of Education.”
About thirty years later, we must now admit it is time to invoke the Reagan directive because the USDOE cannot be any other kind of government than the very worst kind: All uninformed bureaucracy that seeks always to dig deeper from the bottom of a very deep and fruitless hole.
While Reagan’s characterizing the USDOE as an “abomination” may have been premature in the early 1980s, we must admit now that Reagan was prescient.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, states scrambled to “fix” public education through a series of accountability-based bureaucratic mandates built on standards (and new standards) and high-stakes tests (and new high-stakes tests).
By the turn of the century, we witnessed the tipping point that would prove Reagan right—No Child Left Behind [1], the ultimate shifting of know-nothing bureaucracy from the states to the federal government, specifically the USDOE.
Few could have been brave enough to predict that the George W. Bush 8 years of horrible education policy could be trumped by the Obama administration, but we are now solidly in the reality that the USDOE is a total Obamination—relentless failed bureaucracy piled on top of failed bureaucracy.
Under Obama and the appointee-leadership of Secretary Arne Duncan, public education has been bombarded by competitive grants, teacher bashing, union bashing, and a series of policies at the state and federal levels that are neither supported by research nor appropriate responses to the very real problems facing public schools (many of which are beyond the walls or control of those schools).
Even those along a wide spectrum of ideologies who believe in the promise of VAM have consistently demonstrated that VAM is not as effective as policies claim and that VAM should not be used in any high-stakes contexts for schools, teachers, or teacher education.
Those of us who see no promise for VAM add that all this expanded testing is a tremendous waste of time and money—most notably because grasping at measurable data is missing the greatest problems burdening our schools, social and educational inequities (ironically, all circumstances that could be addressed effectively if government would behave as government as demonstrated in many other countries around the world).
As Gerald Bracey explained in numerous contexts, ranking itself is fool’s gold—and in education, ranking is particularly caustic since it creates competition where we should be in collaboration (this is also a fundamental problem with VAM as a mechanism for sorting teachers, schools, or schools/departments of education).
The two most recent abominations are not unique, however, but lie in a long line including Race to the Top, Opting Out of NCLB, and Common Core.
Maybe this will sound outlandish, but let’s consider what people who have taught, studied, and researched the field of education recognize about the proposal to hold colleges/departments of education accountable for the test scores of students being taught by graduates from those colleges/departments (holding grandparents responsible for their grandchildren’s behavior, in effect):
Ridiculous I suppose—like asking the legal profession to weigh in on jurisprudence or the medical profession to craft health policy. [2]
Many people have called for the ghost of Ronald Reagan, and I never counted myself among them until now. But in the waning days of 2014, I welcome that ghost of administration’s past to ramble into the room and, as Holton paraphrased, make the call once again: “And please abolish that abomination, the Department of Education.”
For while schools everywhere reflect to some extent the culture of which they are a part and respond to forces within that culture, the American public schools, because of the nature of their pattern of organization, support, and control, were especially vulnerable and responded quickly to the strongest social forces. . . .The business influence was exerted upon education in several ways: through newspapers, journals, and books; through speeches at educational meetings; and, more directly, through actions of school boards. It was exerted by laymen, by professional journalists, by businessmen or industrialists either individually or in groups. . ., and finally by educators themselves. Whatever its source, the influence was exerted in the form of suggestions or demands that the schools be organized and operated in a more businesslike way and that more emphasis by placed upon a practical and immediately useful education….
The tragedy itself was fourfold: that educational questions were subordinated to business considerations; that administrators were produced who were not, in any true sense, educators; that a scientific label was put on some very unscientific and dubious methods and practices; and that an anti-intellectual climate, already prevalent, was strengthened. (pp. 1, 5-6, 246)
It is a key distinction, but one we often ignored in daily life—that between choice and recognition.
At lunch, we choose the meal we prefer, or while shopping, we choose the outfit in the color that appeals to us. And it is there that we are a bit careless about words and concepts; those choices are actually about recognition.
After about 20+ years of choosing not to eat beef, a couple of years ago, I returned to steak on occasion. I order steaks medium-rare because I recognize that a wide variety of qualities of taste and texture appeal to me in aesthetic/palpable ways in a medium-rare steak.
As clumsy as all this may seem, after having been a teacher of writing for over 30 years and a so-called serious writer for a handful of years longer than that, I believe people fall into two camps related to writing: those who need to or are required to write and those who are writers, the first being somewhat in the arena of choice and the second, a recognition of Self.
Both those who choose (or are compelled) to write and those who are writers can be taught to write well, I am convinced, but I think in much different ways and with a much different attitude by the teacher (notably, recognizing that one is not better than the other, simply different).
“I suppose finally the most important thing was that I am a writer,” Baldwin explained to Studs Terkel in a 1961 interview, adding:
That sounds grandiloquent, but the truth is that I don’t think that, seriously speaking, anybody in his right mind would want to be a writer. But you do discover that you are a writer and then you haven’t got any choice. You live that life or you won’t live any. (p. 20)
In Cheever’s examination of poet e.e. cummings, the life of the writer is highlighted:
Cummings seems like a man with an enviably successful career; but like many American writers he had years of anxiety and hardship, of being sniped at and attacked, of struggling to make a living, to buy food and pay the rent. This kind of rejection is part of being a writer. Men and women who are somehow constituted to get energy from rejection—no matter how painful that might be—are the ones who survive as writers. (p. 114)
And here I stress that being a writer is a recognition, some could argue a compulsion, that certainly can and should be fostered, but is not likely something that can be instilled in others. Sontag, cummings, and Baldwin, it seems to me, had little choice in the matter, but also mostly embraced that inevitable of who they saw themselves to be.
Teaching Poetry as Teaching Writing
As a writer and a writing teacher, I often come back to the power of teaching poetry (reading and wrestling with poetry) and asking students to write poetry, fully aware that most people are not poets. This, I think, is a powerful subset of what it means to teach writing broadly: We are not creating writers, necessarily, and it is not our calling as teachers of writing to treat all students as writers.
So let me offer just a brief consideration of teaching writing to those who choose (or who are compelled) to write as that stands against teaching writing to those who are writers (who recognize “[y]ou live that life or you won’t live any”).
As its essence, writing is about producing an artifact, and understanding that the written thing itself is static, although the meaning (Rosenblatt’s interaction of reader, writer, text) is organic. Many other forms of text (film, visual art, etc.) fall under this same quality, but writing is a static thing restricted to the word and both the conventional and unconventional units made up of words.
To write poetry, then, is to confront that poetry shares with prose the conventional word > phrase > clause > sentence grammar of written language. However, poetry is distinguished from prose by the construction of purposeful lines and stanzas (prose tends to remain within sentence/paragraph boundaries, and thus, not conscious of how those words form on the visual page; prose poetry remains poetry because it is a purposeful rejection of conventional lines and stanzas).
For example, William Carlos Williams write, “so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens”—a grammatical sentence crafted into poetry by the transition into lines and stanzas that impact the reader visually. Or consider “our happiness” by Eileen Myles—a poem remaining fully grammatical but raised to poetry by the craft of lines and stanzas.
To sit down and write poetry, then, the writer must consider the essentials of all effective writing, a complex web of choices that ultimately result in that artifact that is paradoxically both static (a visual construction of words) and organic (reader, writer, text). Those essentials include the following:
Form, medium, and genre—conventions. To construct a poem is to face conventions (writers must either conform to those conventions or reject those conventions, purposefully) about form (lines, stanzas, rhyme, meter, etc.—for poetry), medium (print or visual text), and genre (broadly imaginative [fiction] or factual [non-fiction]; and then, narrowly, realism, fantasy, etc.). Writing is not the inverse of reading, but the product of synthetic discourse of being a reader: The more sophisticated the reader, the more craft the writer. For those choosing or compelled to write, this can be overwhelming; for writers, there is pain in this process for sure, but it is both necessary and never-ending.
Purposefulness. Although any writer may certainly begin writing without a clear purpose, the final artifact of writing must be shaped with both the awareness noted above and then the guiding purpose intact. Since poems tend to be brief, writing poetry is an ideal avenue to understanding, recognizing, and maintaining purpose in a piece of original writing. In different contexts and types of writing, we call this “thesis” or “focus,” but ultimately, writing is about making purposeful decisions mechanical, aesthetic, expressive, and transmissional. If we turn back to cummings, Cheever notes that many who responded negatively to cummings raised concerns about whether or not he sought in any way to communicate with readers; for a writer, few charges could be more damning.
Audience. When I conference with students, I ask questions: What is this thing you are writing (see first bullet)? What are trying to say (second bullet)? And then, who is this for, and why would anyone read this (thus, audience)? If we again return to Rosenblatt, and consider trees falling in the woods with no one around, that static thing called a poem (or essay, or novel) spawned out of a writer’s purpose ultimately seeks an audience in order (again, Rosenblatt) to achieve meaning (the organic and difficult thing possibly most mistreated by formal education). For those choosing to write or compelled to write, the audience is often imposed, mechanical—a key reason prompted and formal school writing is so miserably lifeless. Writers, however, are nothing without an audience, a love/hate relationship not unlike being in a family.
Coherence. And finally, as a static thing, all writing achieves coherence—something or some things designed by the writer to hold it all together. Writing is cobbling, crafting, synthesizing, shaping—especially the poem. In those conferences, we talk about framing a piece of writing, organization, and how the student-as-writer has decided to move the reader from here to there and there and then ultimately there.
So let me end with some offerings.
During my most recent semester teaching first year writing, we read “Gate A-4” by poet Naomi Shihab Nye. My students loved the piece, and we approached it as an essay, but I have seen it called a short story and a poem (so, what is it?). [Pair with her poem, “Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change.”]
What mattered most to me, however, is that my students were eager to say that it was clearly written by a poet, and that means to me, although they are far from finished in most ways as writers, they somehow get it. Few compliments could be higher for a piece, for a writer.
If the education reform movement is transitioning into a next phase and if my call for teaching with our doors open as an act of resistance can gain traction beyond the school house, educators must also begin to lead when our leaders fail, in part by claiming the education reform narrative away from political, media, and non-expert reform advocates.
Here, then, I want to outline the how’s and why’s of raising our professional voices as educators in order to succeed in a public arena:
Too often, educators have been on the defensive, historically and during the recent three decades of accountability, in the education reform debate. That has left those without expertise always determining the ground and content of the debate, framing educators as professionals as always rejecting reform and having little to offer as an alternative. Step one, then, is we must begin to initiate the narratives about what educational problems exist and then what policies better address those needs. This must include avoiding both the people and policies dominating mainstream reform. Instead of rejecting over and over the edu-reform leader of the moment, we must speak with authority on our own terms—not as a response to the person or the policy.
If Edu-reformer X is wrong and lacking credibility, we must not rush to pat Edu-reformer X on the back if/when he/she expresses a position we have offered credibly often. Our evidence-based professional stances are credible on their own; we do not need those without credibility but with misplaced authority in order to be right. For example, as an alternative to refuting edu-reformers, at the school level, since standardized test scores are problematic across public education, we must not celebrate if our school has high test scores, but instead, find more valid ways to celebrate our schools that also honor all public schools.
We must stop trying to out-do the edu-reformers: stop offering better accountability, stop offering better testing, stop offering better standards. The accountability approach to education reform and education is a failure, period. Just as educational leaders have failed by fighting for a place at the accountability table, educators have also too often made this mistake. We must make the case for professional and shared responsibility for the good of each student as well as all students.
We cannot fall prey to government bashing. “Publicly funded,” not “free,” is the heart of a democracy, the essential foundation for economic commitments to work well and for a people to achieve justice. When our government has failed, in fact, it has failed to act as government. It is ours to show that public education rests beside other essentials, such as the fire department or roads/highways, that the public tends to embrace positively.
Stories matter more than research, and words matter. While as professionals we must assert our evidence-based reasons schools struggle and policies to address those problems, we must take care to craft narratives that accurately reflect that research base; here are real people doing real things, and not “research shows.” But just as we must stop playing at the accountability table set for us, we must set aside the words and phrases at the heart of the failed reform agenda: accountability, grit, no excuses, rigor, achievement gap.
More broadly, we must not participate in the decades’ long and corrosive crisis/Utopian discourse framing of current reform: the contradictory education is in perpetual crisis and education is the one true way. They are both false, and they are both counter-narratives to the stories we must tell.
One of the most powerful and complicated parts of the flawed reform agenda is the claim about teacher quality, and here, educators have a huge challenge. We must begin to assert that teachers and teacher quality matter, but that value is not easily measured. As I noted above, this will require that we find avenues and techniques to celebrate our schools, our teachers, and our students in credible and complex ways—stories with teachers and children, and not numbers. And thus, we must shape a community narrative; teacher quality is not about one teacher, but about a community of educators and a community of learners, often over many years. Why not take a class of 8th graders at the end of their journey at a middle school and highlight all three years and all the teachers involved—experiences both academic and extracurricular? Teaching and learning are complex, and often messy; thus, we must make this story vivid and compelling.
Yes, some edu-reformers must be confronted, rarely and when egregious, and some policies must be directly and powerfully refuted (as I have with corporal punishment and grade retention), but we now need to shift the balance of our public voices.
The case, however, is now clear that political leaders, the media, and most edu-reformers have weak credibility and support failed policies.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 