Writing

Fostering the Transition from Student to Writer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

education, No Excuses Reform, race, zero tolerance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

Childhood

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

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

The Small Backs of Children, Lidia Yuknavitch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is money. (pp. 193-194)

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

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

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

See Also

death bed (the silent spines of books)

grammar, Writing

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

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

“The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats

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

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

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

Henry David Thoreau

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See Also

From Ken Lindblom on the Teaching and Learning Forum:

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

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

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

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

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

Here Is Why We Need Transgender Pronouns

The Washington Post will allow singular ‘they’

The Singular “They” — When Pronouns Get Personal

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

education

Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last: “Comedy is so cold and heartless”

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Kurt Vonnegut often confessed that he wrote to a basic pattern, the joke. And while Margaret Atwood‘s voluminous and diverse canon of work is often punctuated with wordplay, the humor is often dark and the overall weight of her fiction is relatively heavy.

About one-fourth of the way into Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last, we encounter that wordplay at the center of the novel when a main character, Charmaine, muses about her work euthanizing undesirables inside the speculative near-future where the economically desperate choose to spend half their lives in prison: “Then he’s unconscious. Then he stops breathing. The heart goes last” (p. 70).

The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury Publishing)

The joke (“the heart goes last” is death, not love) is that this novel filled with a great deal of sex—including sex robots, infidelity, and brain surgery designed to turn people into little more than sex slaves to one individual or object (think The Stepford Wives)—is rarely sexy and certainly void of genuine gestures of love, at least until the twist at the very end.

Atwood’s novels demonstrate a brilliant awareness of and contentious relationship with genre; Atwood is often simultaneously conforming to and resisting the conventions of genre.

Science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopian fiction—these have become touchstones for the later Atwood (since 2003), who has written extensively about genre distinctions as well as having a public debate with Ursula K. Le Guin about science fiction.

For many people, Atwood is defined by her The Handmaid’s Tale, a speculative, dystopian work that she echoed later in her brilliant MaddAddam trilogy—Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam.

In these works, Atwood channels her inner-George Orwell, and argues that she is not creating science fiction (in other words, making things up), but speculating about much that already exists, or has occurred in human history.

These speculative works exhibit her masterful wordplay, but the motifs as well as the plots are dark and heavy.

I would add for context that Atwood also creates characters who are often compelling, complex and worthy of our compassion. In her speculative works, we have someone, or several characters, to pull for, to love.

While many will call The Heart Goes Last science fiction or speculative fiction, this novel is not in the Atwood tradition noted above. Instead of Orwellian, Heart is something of a comic hybrid—Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World meets Idiocracy.

Yes, we meet Charmaine and Stan, a stereotypical hard-working, middle-class couple who has been reduced to living in their car because of an eerily familiar economic downturn that devastates the middle-class and poor; as in our current real world, the wealthy appear mostly unscathed, if not benefitting from this apocalypse that comes upon people like going broke does for Mike in The Sun Also Rises—gradually and then all at once.

The central tricks of the novel also feel like SF—desperate people being coerced to spend half their lives as prisoners to regain economic stability, genetic manipulation of animals for food, sex robots, secretive and mysterious euthanasia, and brain surgery that creates permanent (and perverse) sexual bonds (even between a woman and a knitted doll).

However, readers reaching for Heart and expecting MaddAdam are warned early by Atwood as the narration, a shifting limited omniscient, reveals Charmaine’s thoughts on watching TV while doing her waitressing job:

She can watch TV on the flatscreens, old Elvis Presley movies from the sixties, so consoling; or daytime sitcoms, though they aren’t that funny and anyway comedy is so cold and heartless, it makes fun of people’s sadness. She prefers the more dramatic shows where everyone’s getting kidnapped or raped or shut up in a dark hole, and you aren’t supposed to laugh at it. You’re supposed to be upset, the way you’d be if it was happening to you. Being upset is a warmer, close-up feeling, not a chilly distant feeling like laughing at people. (p. 17)

Expecting Atwood’s manipulation of genre and her laser attention to detail, I see the “comedy is so cold and heartless” as an author’s hint of what is to follow—a work of nearly slapstick comedy exposing that the joke is essential human nature, a shallowness, a heartlessness.

While in The Handmaid’s Tale the wordplay and jokes were embedded in a much darker and serious work, Heart reverses this pattern so that the broadly comedic—sex robots in Elvis and Marilyn Monroe models, the Green Man group—is the main narrative with the dark and serious playing smaller, punctuated roles. [This, I think, makes Atwood’s novel more like Vonnegut than her other speculative fiction.]

About halfway through the novel, for example, again through Charmaine’s perspective, readers are presented with the guiding motif of the speculative story: “Because citizens were always a bit like inmates and inmates were always a bit like citizens, so Consilience and Positron have only made it official” (p. 145).

Free will, sexual attraction/love, fidelity, pop culture, social class inequity, gender roles and sexuality—these issues are examined by Atwood with the same sort of insight and thoughtfulness she brings to all her work. Atwood, for me, is always meticulously well-informed and then capable of seeing and re-seeing the world in ways that are both unexpected and incisive.

Heart is accessible and funny, although it isn’t the sort of speculative, dystopian fiction I most enjoy by her. Ultimately, my main criticism is that Heart never offers any characters for whom I care, leaving me, like Charmaine (sort of), needing a bit of brain surgery so that when I face them again, I can fall in love with their not-so-funny inadequacies of simply being human.

Capitalism

Are We the Walking Dead?

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What do presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Pope Francis, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and The Walking Dead have in common?

Capitalism. Or more precisely, scathing criticism of capitalism.

“The Walking Dead returns this Sunday [11 October 2015],” writes Erik Kain in Forbes, “and it pulls no punches.”

While Kain’s tease about the return of the AMC series for season 6 focuses on character conflict and plot, the broader punches of zombie narratives—and possibly an explanation for their appeal—are the metaphorical commentaries on human nature as shaped by a consumer capitalism culture.

Zombies are reanimated humans, reduced entirely to being consumers. Consuming is the only act of the zombie, driven to consume for the sake of consuming.

In most zombie narratives, including The Walking Dead, zombies are very frail and disturbingly slow—but their power lies in their relentlessness and usually either the sheer number of zombies or the coincidence of facing them in restricted spaces (claustrophobia is a regular feature of horror).

Once the zombie apocalypse happens, that reality becomes every-present. No one can take a vacation from the fact of zombies.

And there we have the ultimate power and aesthetic beauty of genre, zombie narratives as a hybrid of science fiction and horror. Zombie stories are not mere escapist fiction, but harsh and even distilled mirrors of what we have become in a world that is—like the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse—defined by consumer capitalism. No one can take a vacation from the fact of consumer capitalism.

Just as the zombie virus reanimates humans and thus erases that humanity, replacing it with sheer unbridled consumption, consumer capitalism animates us and erases our humanity, replacing it with the incessant need to work, to make money, to spend money, and to consume for the sake of consuming.

In both AMC’s prequel spin-off, Fear the Walking Dead, and the original comic-book adaptation, The Walking Dead, viewers are confronted repeatedly with a motif that shows characters facing the reality of who they must become to survive. The living, in fact, are far more terrifying in these stories that the simplistic and every darkly silly zombies themselves.

As millions will gather to watch the season opener of The Walking Dead, prompted to discuss and debate the characters and their actions (AMC offers as well Talking Dead, of course), we will likely fail to examine the great irony of this series and its place in the consumer culture (generating viewers, generating revenue); we will likely fail to walk ourselves to the mirror and look closely to see that we are the walking dead.

race

This Week in Whitemansplaining: Gun-Fetish Fatalism and Thinly Veiled Racism

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This week, in the U.S. where the female nipple is more dangerous than a gun, Jay Ambrose assures us that gun violence, including mass shootings at a daily pace, cannot be curbed by laws restricting gun ownership because Russia and single-parent families.

Ambrose throws up his hands at trying gun laws—”probably futile”—because, you know, Russia. And then the real kicker:

But President Barack Obama himself has underlined the single-parent linkage with crime, and some of the most prestigious think tanks in the land — conservative, liberal and in between — have produced impressive analytical and statistical backing for the proposition.

Along with his gun-fetish fatalism (“the charade of more gun control”), Ambrose offers thinly veiled racism with “single-parent families” (a corrosive trigger similar to Reagan’s “welfare queen”) and “gang shooters” (right in their with “thug” and “black-on-black crime” as the sort of racism allowed in polite company).

By the end of his whitemansplaining, Ambrose characterizes “mass shootings” as “a tiny percentage of all the killings,” which he again claims are more a result of single-parent families than gun-lust in the U.S.

But the key in the final paragraph is his shout out to “decent citizens defending themselves with guns,” and we should ask who those people look like.

This callous and hollow commentary comes just after I have read and responded to 24 first-year writing students’ essays; that assignment required them to write a public piece in an on-line format—using hyperlinks for support and images/video to augment their exposition or argument.

If I were to toss Ambrose’s piece into the pile, I would be forced to ask why he cherry-picked Russia—ignoring the powerful and persuasive evidence from European and Scandinavian countries with strong gun restrictions and incredibly rare mass shootings.

I also would ask why, if his evidence is so compelling, he fails to offer any hyperlinks to all that evidence—depending instead on shallow and coded rhetoric (the last refuge of the incompetent and deceptive).

With just a small amount of effort, Ambrose—if he were sincere—could point to the Department of Justice data that show crime and gun violence are extremely complicated topics but also refute the racist implications of his piece: all violent crime is almost entirely within race (“84% of white victims were killed by whites” and “93% of black victims were killed by blacks”; see page 13).

A little more research and Ambrose would find that single-parent families are also a very complicated part of the U.S.; notable is that despite popular assumptions whites are the largest number (9,289,000 compared to 6,427,000/ black and 7,044,000/ Hispanic/ Latino).

Ambrose’s entire pitch depends on making sweeping and unsupportable claims that seem true to the general public; his assertions and the ugly implications (which he either does with intent or is so privileged he cannot see his own racism) are the very worst of what counts as public commentary in the U.S.

While we must not make the same errors in logic and rhetoric that Ambrose does, it seems far more credible to state that gun-fetish fatalism and racism are greater causes of our violent nation than single-parent families.

Once again, Ambrose and his ilk need to stop their whitemansplaining and take a long hard look in the mirror.

Lou LaBrant, reading, teacher preparation, Teaching

Lou LaBrant and Teacher Education’s Enduring Legacy

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A colleague of Louise Rosenblatt at New York University, Lou LaBrant faced mandatory retirement when she turned 65 in 1953. Reflecting on her work at NYU as a teacher educator from 1942-1953, LaBrant wrote in 1988 “Public School 65, Down on the Lower East Side” as she turned 100.

LaBrant noted “that [New York City] requirements seemed to me inadequate for those who already spoke the language clearly but needed a richer background” (p. 6). Candidates for teaching English, LaBrant argued, needed greater linguistic understanding and experiences grounded in the complex Germanic and Latinate roots of English.

But other regulations also impeding LaBrant’s goals, including restrictions on the number of student teachers placed in each school. Circumventing that restriction, however, LaBrant placed 6 teacher candidates at “P.S. 65, a junior high school on the Lower East Side, known as one of the worst slum areas in the city” (p. 7). LaBrant then explained her choice (p. 7):

two years below

Next, LaBrant built her program and the experience for the student teachers on the characteristics of the students being taught—a progressive and student-centered approach to scientific education. The students at P.S. 65, they found, had very limited experiences with the wider city, lived in cramped and poorly lit housing, had no books or reading materials in the home, had life experience unlike the national research on student reading interests, and attended a school in which “[t]eachers did not welcome an assignment to the area and within ten minutes after the final gong were on their way to the subway to avoid the five o’clock rush” (p. 8).

In that context, LaBrant’s program included taking students on bus trips to explore the city, having librarians provide students time and opportunities to examine and choose books that matched their interests, committing to not requiring book reports, and creating an overarching goal that “[s]chool was to become a pleasant place” for students and their teachers.

Key, as well, was LaBrant’s rejecting deficit views of race, literacy, and poverty that pervaded popular practices: “This simple program did not depend on the theories about word count, word recognition, left-handedness, or any of the educational fads then popular” (p. 9). This “simple” approach to teaching reading was a hallmark of LaBrant’s work, including her rejecting reading programs as “costume parties” (LaBrant, 1949).

And while LaBrant admitted she did not know the long-term results of her work, she did note that this year, this “simple” experiment with teaching a vulnerable population of students (impoverished, racial minorities and English language learners) resulted in reading levels that “[rose] from two years below to two years above” in the city testing.

Today, we can see LaBrant’s legacy endures: public education policy that impedes teacher education, reading programs and “fads” that overcomplicate and distort literacy education, and the lingering challenge of teaching vulnerable populations of students who have strengths and unique needs that cannot be addressed through deficit ideologies or “silver bullet” approaches to schooling.

In 1940, LaBrant implored: “Language is a most important factor in general education because it is a vital, intimate way of behaving. It is not a textbook, a set of rules, or a list of books” (p. 364).

Again, teacher education and teaching children to read are, in fact, “simple”—if we allow them to be.

References

LaBrant, L. (1988). Public School 65, down on the lower east side. Teaching Education, 2(1), 6-9.

LaBrant, L. (1949). A genetic approach to language. Unpublished manuscript, Institute of General Semantics, Lakeville, CT.

LaBrant, L. (1940, May). The place of English in general education. The English Journal, 29(5), 356-365.

Charter schools

North Carolina: The Anatomy of How Sham “Research” Becomes Bad Education Policy

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First, count on the media: An Orwellian (read: misleading) headline, North Carolina Senate approves funding equality bill.

Add an equally Orwellian lede: “North Carolina senators passed a bill Monday night that would push public schools toward more equitable funding.”

And then stir in the kicker, sham “research” from a bogus university “department”: “North Carolina charter schools receive 83 cents for every dollar traditional public schools receive, according to a study by researchers at the University of Arkansas. Bill proponents say this is unfair.”

The study? Bruce Baker concludes in a review:

The University of Arkansas Center for Education Reform’s report on charter school funding inequities proclaims large and growing inequities between school district and charter school revenues, even after accounting for differences in student needs. But the report displays complete lack of understanding of intergovernmental fiscal relationships, which results in the blatantly erroneous assignment of “revenues” between charters and district schools. A district’s expenditure can be a charter’s revenue, since charter funding is in most states and districts received by pass-through from district funding, and districts often retain responsibility for direct provision of services to charter school students—a reality that the report entirely ignores when applying its resource-comparison framework. In addition, the report suffers from alarmingly vague documentation regarding data sources and methodologies, and it constructs entirely inappropriate comparisons of student population characteristics. Simply put, the findings and conclusions of the study are not valid or useful.

This toxic formula of naive and/or biased media plus the erosion of scholarship into mere think-tank advocacy resulting in Orwellian public policy isn’t unique to NC, but nonetheless, shame on political leadership in NC for allowing yet more bad policy to dismantle public education.

educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free