[Header Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash]

I learned the word “obsequious” from Steve Martin’s “Grandmother’s Song” off his 1977 album Let’s Get Small.

A couple years before that, I recall vividly looking up and reading about Beelzebub (which led to similar explorations of Mephistopheles) because I was listening to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” over and over.

However, at school in my English classes, I hated (no, loathed) our vocabulary textbooks, vocabulary homework, and vocabulary tests. Those tests, also, kept me a steady B student instead of my usual A’s in almost all of my classes.

I also hated and often avoided reading the books assigned in my English classes, but at home, I was reading every novel by Arthur C. Clarke and many popular science fiction works such as those by Niven and Pournelle.

And I was collection and reading 1000s of comic books, meticulously and with great joy.

Except for two years with my life-changing sophomore and junior year English teacher, Lynn Harrill (who was an early adopter of the National Writing Project practices), I had stereo-typically harsh and traditional English teachers throughout junior and high school.

Grade 8 was spent dutifully plowing through the grammar book—exercises and chapter tests. Grade 9 was diagramming sentences and then diagramming more sentences.

My senior year of high school, I sat in the room of an English teacher who literally wore a bun of grey hair and most of us found ourselves receiving inspiring grades on our essays (in bold red ink) such as A/F or B/F because the department had a detailed list of errors and point deductions.

A fragment or run-on sentence was an instant F on grammar (the bottom grade) as was 6 misspelled words.

Despite my highly literate (and mostly closeted) life at home, I graduated high school with a great deal of affection for Mr. Harrill but mostly hating English and planning to major in physics (making almost straight As in math and science classes).

Despite all that, five years later, I sat in Mr. Harrill’s room, replacing him as an English teacher. I had also discovered in the mean time I was a writer.

Mr. Harrill planted some important seeds, but even in his much more progressive class where we wrote essays instead of marching through grammar books, he was mostly canon-centric (telling me to stop reading science fiction and read Fitzgerald instead)—and, yes, those damn vocabulary books.

My career as an English teacher started in 1984 with me seeking ways to avoid many of those problematic practices that essentially were barriers to my discovering and embracing my literacy life as a teen.

Let me point out that my journey started with many problems as well; I had only a couple years of some modeling from Mr. Harrill and my teacher prep was mostly grounded in traditional assumptions about teaching and literacy. My student teaching also found me in two very traditional and harsh teachers’ classrooms.

But my heart told me to focus on my students, and my practice gradually centered student choice over imposing what Lou LaBrant aptly called “adult weariness” in 1949:

We must therefore be careful in criticizing the writing of the young, or in talking over poetry they enjoy, not to superimpose our own experience on them. The metaphor which seems stale or worn to us may be apt and new to them, and it is a happy circumstance that this is so. It is therefore not important that the figure which the student uses be new or unique to the adult; but it is of great necessity that the phrase express what the student really sees or believes and that he be made aware of the pitfalls of the too easily accepted phrase. On the other hand, we should not, under the guise of developing literary standards, merely pass along adult weariness. (pp. 275-276)

All of formal schooling is too often driven by that “adult weariness”—but especially literacy instruction, which is often very traditional and conservative.

Take for example a couple articles highlighted in a recent email from ASCD:

• TEACHER VOICE: Big mistake — Schools are swapping out Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dickens for Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift
• Teachers banned slang after hearing too much ‘rizz’: A helpful lesson or ‘anti-academic’?

Even as a still-evolving critical teacher, I grounded my poetry unit in the songs of R.E.M., and we never banned slang but instead examined how words came to be and why language evolved (taking a descriptive grammar stance).

At the core of why I find the “science of reading” (SOR) movement so problematic is that “adult weariness” is a driving force of the reductive view of reading, literacy, and text characterizing SOR ideology.

As more scholars and teachers are noting, SOR defaults to a singular view of literacy and reading resulting in a scripted approach to literacy instruction.

The consequence of this reductive view of reading and teaching will be even more students having the same negative experience I had as a student.

Yes, in spite of those negative experiences, here I am—voracious reader, professional writer, and 41-year-long teacher of literacy.

Like LaBrant, I think there shouldn’t be an “in spite of” since literacy learning and literacy teaching can and should be things of joy.

Some times I worry that adults impose their weariness on children because adults resent childhood and adolescent joy, because adults have abdicated their own joy.

And because there was joy, in my 63-year-old soul, my 16-year-old self still smiles recalling Martin sing:

Be courteous, kind and forgiving
Be gentle and peaceful each day
Be warm and human and grateful
And have a good thing to say

Be thoughtful and trustful and childlike
Be witty and happy and wise
Be honest and love all your neighbors
Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant

In his silliness, there is a joy, an anti-adult weariness that has always inspired me.

Childlike, in fact, is a wonderful thing.

[Header Photo by Sam Balye on Unsplash]

This is both a favorite lede in mainstream media and a perfect example of the enduring story we tell about education in the U.S.:

Fewer than half of New York City public school students showed proficiency on reading exams this year, a decline from the previous year that may reflect how hard it is to change teaching approaches as the district embarks on a major reading overhaul. (Troy Closson, New York Times)

If time travel were possible, we could visit virtually any moment in the U.S. over the past 100 years and the story would be the same: Kids today cannot read!

But over the past five decades, the state of schools, teaching, and student achievement has been the focus of perpetual accountability-based education reform grounded in high-stakes testing and standards.

That reform has existed in a repeated cycle of crisis/reform, including periodic elevated concern for student reading achievement. Reading reform almost always sits in what has become know as the Reading War.

The Reading War and reading crisis have a long history, reaching at least back into the 1940s.

Therefore, the lede quoted above is mostly not unlike the public perception of student reading for about a century, although the current Reading War is couched in the high-stake environment of education reform and a media story that is both compelling and misleading as well as often entirely false.

Thus, the reading proficiency decline in NYC sits within a high-profile movement, the “science of reading” (SOR) story driven by mainstream media and resulting in new or revised reading policy across most states.

While the media focus on NYC is outsized and thus misleading, the dynamics at play in NYC do serve as a cautionary tale about policy and legislation reform grounding in a Reading War.

One of those cautions is embedded in the article:

Education officials in New York sought to frame the reading drop as part of the natural pains that come with reform….

“Significant change does not happen overnight,” the New York City schools chancellor, David C. Banks, said in a statement. He called the “slight decline” in reading scores reflective of “a transitional period as our school system adjusts to a new method of instruction.”

Education reform is fraught with identifying problems, posing reforms, and then measuring learning outcomes in valid ways.

Yes, education reform is often followed by measurable learning declines; therefore, the NYC officials are not skirting responsibility.

However, there is a significant problem: Reading in the U.S. (and NYC) is not in crisis, and reading programs themselves have not failed students.

NYC scrapping and banning some reading programs, mandating a few new programs, and then, implementing “a new method of instruction” is the problem with this Reading War and reading reform based on the crisis rhetoric and misinformation about student reading achievement.

Reading Wars, in fact, fuel educational churn, specifically churn in the education market place, but the crisis/reform cycles have never resulted in raising student achievement.

Regardless of Reading Wars or reform cycles, the story remains the same: Students can’t read, teachers do not know how to teach reading, and schools are failing.

The perpetual war that results in constant reform, then, includes collateral damage.

Broadly, that collateral damage reflects a paradox: Education reform simultaneously claims to be in service of teachers and student while also making false and negative claims about those teachers and students.

More narrowly and specifically in the context of the SOR Reading War, one of the key elements of collateral damage is instructional—the erasure of workshop approaches to literacy instruction because of the disproportionate and false attacks on Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study and reading programs by Fountas and Pinnell.

I entered the K-12 classroom as a teacher in 1984. To be blunt, I was solidly prepared by my education program to teach high school literature, but I was nearly lost in terms of teaching writing.

Fortunately, I was already a practicing writer, but I had to build my knowledge of composition instruction while I was teaching high school students.

The foundation upon which I have built a 40-plus-year career as a teacher of writing included two important people and their work—Nancie Atwell and Calkins.

Atwell and Calkins provided for me the workshop structure—time, ownership, and response—that fore-fronted student-centered instruction as well as honoring students experiencing authentic and holistic literacy experiences to grow as readers and writers.

Reading about using reading/writing workshop was a beginning, but the next step was crucial—attending two summer programs by the National Writing Project/Spartanburg Writing Project where we experienced workshop ourselves to guide implementing workshop as teachers.

The current erasure of workshop because of the false SOR story today is not unique. The teaching of reading and writing over the last century has been scarred often by fads as well as misunderstanding and implementing incorrectly what are otherwise credible and effective practices.

For example, Lou LaBrant confronted misusing the project method in 1931, and Lisa Delpit offered a nuanced challenge to how writing workshop implementation often failed marginalized students.

Workshop approaches to teaching literacy should include meeting the individual needs of every student based on demonstrated strengths and needs; that must be in the form of authentic artifacts of learning, student reading authentic texts by choice and writing original texts by choice.

But if workshop structures do not provide direct instruction, for example, students suffer. That failure is not a flaw of workshop but a failure of implementation (what Delpit confronted, for example [1]).

Reading Wars narrowly and education reform broadly have the same essential flaws—misdiagnosed crisis followed by overly simplistic solutions in the form of policy and legislation mandates.

Yes, there is media, market, and political capital in Reading Wars, but (too) similar to actual wars, these repeated Reading Wars have collateral damage.

Once again, the SOR movement is harming teachers and students, and one of the greatest losses is the erasure of workshop, which honors individual student learning and authentic literacy.

Almost 60 years apart, LaBrant and Delpit—both progressive/critical educators and scholars—confronted and rejected what many would consider to be key progressive instructional practices, project-based learning and writing workshop.

Their concerns were valid because they were acknowledge how the implementation of both too often failed progressive/critical standards for all serving students well in the context of intended learning goals.

Too much historically and recently about literacy instruction has also failed progressive/critical standards for serving all students.

But the SOR movement is not making that case and, in fact, is making conditions for learning and teaching worse because it remains grounded in banning and mandating reading programs—not seeking ways to better support teachers serving the needs of all students.

In the wake of this Reading War, students and teachers are once again collateral damage because the war serves something other than learning and teaching.

[1] Delpit:

I do not advocate a simplistic ‘basic skills’ approach for children outside of the culture of power. It would be (and has been) tragic to operate as if these children were incapable of critical and higher-order thinking and reasoning. Rather, I suggest that schools must provide these children the content that other families from a different cultural orientation provide at home. This does not mean separating children according to family background, but instead, ensuring that each classroom incorporate strategies appropriate for all the children in its confines.

[Header Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash]

Although hard to believe, it has been almost 20 years since I was sitting in a hotel with a friend after a bit too much day drinking in New Orleans during an education conference.

This was the spring before Katrina, and our conference was in the convention center that would become infamous during that disastrous hurricane.

We were watching Charlie Rose interview George Carlin from 1996. Like W.E.B. DuBois, Carlin explained why he was a non-voter.

While I have never been a partisan, and I have always felt a great deal of skepticism about politicians, I had dutifully voted since turning 18 in 1979.

Neither DuBois or Carlin, I must emphasize, were taking a “both sides” approach to politics in the US; however, they were confronting how in the context of their time that the policy implications of voting were not as clearly defined by who you voted for or what party came into power.

One of the first scholarly pieces I published, in fact, came out in the late 1990s; I made the case that for education policy, specifically in my home state of South Carolina, neither party offered any promise of the sort of education policy I supported.

So in the 2000s I became a non-voter also.

For me, the other aspect of this practice was (and remains) that in SC, we are an entrenched Red state; most elections have only a Republican on the ballot. Whether I vote or not in SC has no impact on the outcome.

This certainly made my stance a pale form of performance (or non-performance)—merely symbolic.

Just about a decade into that commitment, I did recognize that the era of Trump was different.

It was futile, but I voted for Hillary Clinton, and I begrudgingly voted for Joe Biden. Neither vote made any difference in SC, of course.

Yet, there simply is no way to justify voting for Trump or voting/not voting in ways that allow Trump to win.

By 2024, we can no longer claim that policy outcomes are essentially the same regardless of party in power.

Too many were naive, and we collectively allowed the US to render women not fully human with the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The US has been awash in book bans, curriculum bans, assaults on LGBTQ+ rights, and a horrifying realization that Christian Nationalism is a possible future reality for a country founded on religious freedom as well as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In recent weeks, the nonsense arguments that people couldn’t vote for Biden has been unmasked as well.

With Biden out of the picture, the utter horror and emptiness of Trump/Vance have come more fully into focus (mostly for those who refused to see).

Trump hasn’t changed.

Only the context has.

Yet some continue to refuse to support Harris/Walz for so-called ethical positions about Palestine or some other essentially leftist or progressive ideal.

Before Harris chose Walz, I too championed a key policy concern of mine; I publicly rejected Shapiro for his horrible education policy (reminding me of the Obama/Duncan era of education reform disasters).

However, I was certain Shapiro would be chosen, and, yes, I would have still voted Harris.

How on earth could not voting Harris in any way help the issue I was committed to?

There is no universe in which Trump being elected benefits any position you believe is leftist or progressive.

The people in Palestine and Ukraine, women in the US, LGBTQ+ people in the US, Black Americans—none of these groups with whom many of us stand as allies will be helped if Trump is not elected.

The only option is Harris/Walz—regardless of the many credible criticisms we may have of their policies and even them as people.

Yet, as people, they seem at least worthy of my support in the context of mainstream politicians.

You must be incredibly naive to think there are politicians who are not at least ethically compromised. Those politicians who are wealthy are almost certainly doubly ethically compromised.

With Trump/Vance, we have candidates who without question cannot be supported because of deep personally failures and anti-democratic policy commitments.

Ultimately, however, we cannot allow this presidential election (or our democracy) to remain mired in the cult of personality.

Frankly it doesn’t matter if a candidate is likable; we should be voting for what policy insures the most human rights and human dignity to the most people.

In 2024, this isn’t even a close question.

Republicans are the party of bans, denying rights, and seeking ways to impose a singular way of living onto everyone, Christian nationalism.

Democrats have been an impotent party, a spineless party.

But Democrats are our only option if we have any hope for not only full humanity and rights throughout the US, but also imploring the US to extend its power to protect all people throughout the world as well.

It seemed a principled option just a couple decades ago to be a non-voter. Or even a protest voter.

It seems capricious, self-defeating, and frankly calloused to take that stance today.

I love George Carlin who profoundly shaped my life, but I must say today, there is nothing funny about politics and elections in the US.

Voting in 2024 is life-or-death for the most vulnerable among us, which now include more than half the US—the girls and women who call the US their home.

What am I voting for? Harris/Walz.

Because that is a vote not for those two people, but for all of us, all of humankind, all of human decency.

Note

For the grammar Nazis, let me clarify I recognize that “whom” is, at best, in Hospice and I have never trafficked in the “don’t end a sentence or question with a preposition” camp. I know, I know, many think the headline should be “For What (Not Whom) Are We Voting?” I humbly disagree.

[Header Photo by Glenov Brankovic on Unsplash]

brown men and women
in hard hats
neon yellow and orange shirts
and mud-caked work boots
build apartments
along the rail trail
where i ride my bicycle
for recreation and exercise

i know they are brown
and i have heard them
speaking spanish
but i cannot say they are mexican
or south american
i have seen them smile
and heard them laughing
i don’t know if they are citizens
i don’t know their politics
but i know they are brown

one day i pass them
during lunch
playing soccer
in those mud-caked work boots
on the new asphalt parking lot
as if playing soccer
is the most normal thing to do
in south carolina
in late july 2024
when the whole world
is going to hell
around us

—P.L. Thomas

I just finished my fortieth year as a teacher, spending the first 18 years as a high school English teacher in my hometown. As an English teacher, my favorite unit was teaching poetry grounded in the music catalogue of alternative rock group REM, based in Athens, GA, only a few hours from that high school.

Partly as a reference to REM’s song and partly as a bit of a play on words, “Welcome to the Occupation” was posted on my door—both as a reference to occupied territory and to “occupation” also meaning “job.”

And as you enter my class in this course, I think you may be initially disoriented because I practice my job of “teacher” and have expectations for your job as “student” in ways that you likely have not experienced before.

Your job as a student, I believe, is to learn, and my job as a teacher is to create the best opportunities for you to learn.

What that means is that you must do the work—not me—in order to learn at the highest level possible.

I have a doctorate, called a “terminal” degree; in other words, I am finished being a students. Thus, I do not want or need to do your assignments for you.

While I will provide a great deal of guidance, feedback, and opportunities to revise and resubmit your major assignments (often essays), I will be adamant that you do the work. I resist hand-holding and making your assignment decisions for you.

That environment, I understand, can be stressful; therefore, I do not grade your work, and you are not at risk of losing points or receiving a low grade simply for making your best effort and occasionally falling short of expectations.

If your work isn’t what is expected or required, you simply must try again—nothing lost except a bit of time.

In fact, since you are learning, I expect you to not quite yet know what to do or how.

If you could do all the work of the course perfectly on the first try, there would be no point for you being in the course, right?

I must also stress that my feedback is never in anger, with disappointment, or offered in any context except hoping I can help you be successful.

That I am demanding or have a high bar for submitting work that I will accept and respond to is a compliment, not a criticism. I truly trust you will succeed and often excel giving the support and expectations I provide.

You may or will struggle mostly not because of something lacking or “wrong” with you, but because this is a new kind of expectations, a new kind of occupation for you as students.

That different expectation is that you are doing the work and learning for you, and not me.

One thing we will work to avoid is you behaving like a student. In other words, when you have an essay to work on, I want you to think and act like a writer, not a student turning in a paper to the teacher for a grade.

I try, then, to make sure the writing assignments are the sort of writing real writers write (not research papers, for example, because that isn’t something writers do).

So what are the habits you have developed, actually learned, over years of formally schooling that I want you to resist and change?

First, I want you to set aside the deficit ideology you have been taught. Making mistakes, or errors, and the need to correct your work—these are deficit views of your job as a learner.

In other words, you will not be correcting your writing. I want you to do what writers do—revise and edit. And those revisions and edits are your decisions in the context of the assignment and the expectations of the type of writing you are drafting.

Next, I want you to take ownership of your learning and work. I often have students ask me what to do or how to do something that they can, and should, simply explore on their own.

For example, when students are working on a cited essay, they often ask how to cite a specific type of source (for example, a YouTube video or a Kindle book). Instead of asking me to do that work, a student can, and should, simply do an internet search for how to cite that source in the format required.

These shifts are broadly about shifting the center of power from the teacher/professor to the learner.

This is your learning, and your work. You will gain more and value the work more as you begin to have accountability for that work instead of shifting the responsibility to your teacher or professor.

I don’t see the occupations of teacher and student as games, or some sort of tug-of-war between competing forces.

Teaching and learning are collaborations that should be grounded in the experiences that create learning.

Doing work for a grade under the authority of a teacher is the experience most of you have had, but I think that is asking way too little of either the teacher or the students.

What we will do in here is messy, unpredictable, frustrating at times, but highly rewarding when we simply run out of time for this experience and must move on.

It is best not to fret, trust yourself and me, and then also trust that you will learn even though you have much more to learn.

And that is fine.

The day we stop learning is a kind of end to be fully human.

Humans fall a bit short, learn, and continue toward the next things that make us the new person we continue to become to be.

Welcome to the occupation.