Worst Teacher of the Year: Notes for an Acceptance Speech

Hooray once more for Spokane producing this year's Teacher of the Year, but say: Is there an award for worst teacher of the year, worst schedule, worst school? If there wasn't before, I might claim the inaugural recognition. Somewhere, a student goes from class to class with teacher after teacher nearly as bad as me (and maybe I'm one of them). And whatever the worst school is, I would guess it's a middle school (and maybe it's the one where I find myself).

How did things come to this pass? In a word: cupidity.

As the remarkably still-relevant local press has been reporting, the state of Washington recently coughed up millions of dollars for funding public education, which the state's teacher's union promptly pounced upon for teacher pay raises. All very well so far.

Then a couple of weeks ago the conscientious if somewhat haughty substitute teacher you see before you received a welcome email: the first opportunity of the year to work at the same placement for potentially weeks on end, for a teacher out with a broken bone.

Now, the calculation which entered into my mind was a far simpler one than that animating the teachers' union--if I work the same job 20 consecutive days, my pay roughly doubles. Middle school is not my favorite, and I knew this would be a particularly difficult school, but the decision was simple. Mercenary gain outweighed any other considerations.

For a week or so all went well enough. It was still early in the school year, and the students were not sure yet who I was. Despite being responsible for only three periods a day, I was there over half time and thus being paid a full day rate, until the 20-day policy should become retroactive and my cup start to runneth over. Then one morning I arrived to hear some troubling news: the time-sheets would be adjusted to show just .5 days, with the other .1 entered somewhere else as "supplemental pay." Thus, even once I got to the magical twentieth day, my hourly boost would only result in a slightly higher amount of money per day than if I had been working random jobs here and there, which would have been much less stressful.

The administrator in charge, the sub dispatcher, explained that this shift in policy had come about due to the teachers' raise. Suddenly, because as a long-term sub I would be paid according to experience and educational attainment an hourly salary, like any non-substitute teacher, my take-home pay would sharply decrease! I heard from the custodians that they--the district admin--were going to let go of veteran staff and not rehire, so as to prevent shortfalls in the future budget. But the immediate consequence of the squeeze on me was a wave of cynicism. The scales dropped from my eyes. Here is what I beheld:

The disastrous scene at the high school already mentioned, at which I was present only because I was now available to take half-day morning jobs so as to fill up my newly-jiggered time-sheet.

Then on my bike ride up to the middle school, I wondered how much of that money would go towards the union's continued lawsuits against charter schools in WA. How much to early-release days for collaboration time every other week. To walking the fine line between breaking students of their disrespect and bending to their sweetness--all the time spent on refocusing and behavior contracts and social faux pas rather than actual instruction or practice, a vanishingly small part of any class period. How this balance is reversed whenever students are allowed to play sports or games. How long it will be before flipping the school day means not just swapping in-class time from instruction, which can be delivered just as well via video, to practice and coaching, but until academics become the extracurricular and athletics the ostensible focus. Until public schools, like universities, openly devote their resources toward producing winning teams and top players, rather than to teaching. Following the market forces to their natural endpoint: to LeBron James funding schools, just as to Gates funding Khan Academy...

The raucous class in the Spanish room the period before I started drove me out from my borrowed desk to an empty chair down the hall of the third floor mezzanine. I sat there typing some of this on my phone as kids downstairs played with the elevator. Its door opened, no one going in or coming out, and closed again.

The mezzanine--love that word--wraps around the cavernous library, the one room in the school which is consistently quiet, mainly because it is generally empty. It takes up a huge amount of space and seems to pay two librarians full-time to preside over this vast emptiness. I figured out how to get my school laptop connected to the printer there, only to be passive-aggressively scolded by one of them for printing out copies of black-and-white images, causing the expensive toner to run low.

Those copies, then, mostly turn into cuttings and crumplings to be thrown gleefully around the room while the images are supposed to be getting pasted into the students' interactive notebooks, often as complex flipbooks and foldables designed to engage those kinesthetic and spatial learners who, as I've said, will be mostly throwing things at each other instead. It becomes a daily purgatory for the few students who do listen and take down the minimal notes of actual Spanish into their notebooks, and for me. Deeply humbling, to daily ask for attention to teach the words with which to understand the world anew, and be ignored, I tell you what.

Taking their four or five phrases and questions, all we had managed to copy down together, the class was supposed to put together a comic strip of a conversation in Spanish. Here I should have showed them, I realized while listening to Art Spiegelman deliver his talk at Gonzaga that night, a sample of a finished comic. Having deprived them of Peanuts, I'm just as hopeless as the English teacher who deprived her class of the Adoration of the Magi.

One great thing the author of Maus said: wasting time like he had to do before the internet, he used to look up words. He showed a definition of comics from an old illustrated dictionary. It mentioned story, so he had looked that up next. Apparently, the two meanings of story--the narrative and the architectural--are deeply related. The story in a building comes from the same word, historia, as the stories we tell, and in that case it refers to the comics in stone and stained glass which used to wreath the houses of worship...

The opulence of the Gonzaga campus, blocks away from the chaos of the middle school. Its hum and buzz of elegant industry, beside our cacophony and squalor. There are flyers posted around the middle school about Gonzaga students coming to play basketball certain days after school. I hope that makes some kid's day.

Then there was the time the door to the classroom opened and admitted a student who had never before come to class, though he was on the roster. I fell over myself to give him our cutable handout of the day.

Somewhere between the private college and the public school, between homeschooling and truancy, between bending and breaking, there has to be a better way.

Overheard

"In the old days, people would be saving their pennies; these days--I was at the football game last week, and at the concessions stand you'd see people pay for something and then just throwing away change. And it's the same all around the halls, there's coins just lying there. People don’t think it’s worth their time to keep their change. It’s like, they don’t know what money is."

"What is money?"

"Money is money."

"I’m gonna be honest, I don’t know what Christmas is."

The same student had said this earlier, but was ignored in the free-for-all then. This time, when he repeated the evocative confession word for word, a few protested incredulously, but the teacher cut in again overtop of them, mistaking speaker for subject, summary for style, in a lesson on opening paragraphs of O. Henry’s 'Gift of the Magi' and Poe’s 'Cask of Amontillado.' In theory the lesson, read straight from the book, would have been covering style and symbol, incorporating earlier lessons on diction, syntax, imagery, and point of view. In practice it was a catastrophe, as you have it here.

When I arrived before the bell, the teacher betrayed apathy toward my presence and disgust with the class, mustering the dregs of resentment against the para I was subbing for.

"I'm here for so-and-so," I said, "--or rather, she's in the BI room while covering for the teacher who's out today while I cover for her. So just let me know how I can help."

"Oh, she doesn't do anything, just sits there on her phone." It's what she had been doing when I talked to her in the BI room; I got the sense she was the softball coach, and might be doing something related to that important job.

I made a non-committal sound of commiseration, looking around the classroom, and repeated my intention to do something to help the teacher if she would only say what that might be.

"I don't even know which kids she's assigned to work with, since no one has bothered to tell me." An appealing glance to another para who had come in; they conferred briefly. "She mostly hangs out on that side of the room. If you see kids off-task or whatever...just stand over by them if you see they’re being a jerk."

Between the dull workbook and this husk of a teacher, the lesson was seemingly designed not only to be incomprehensible, but to drive anyone away from ever stepping into an English class or picking up a book again. The entry task invited students to write about a symbol in their culture and its importance. No guidance was given, aside from the example of the american flag.

The lesson proper began with a description of the two textbooks/workbooks and their provenance. Evidently the slim one they had been using was a pilot curriculum specially provided for this fortunate school, whereas they would now be using the thick normal one from here on out. I could weep to imagine how much all these books and the hours spent by pseudo-experts in compiling and marketing them must have cost. The students' eyes glazed over.

Then suddenly the teacher was saying to copy the definitions of literary terms from the pages' sidebars into some section of their notebooks--another lengthy sidebar, which the teacher totally ignored, dealt with using semicolons--but giving no time or explicit direction to do so, she moved straight into the instructions for reading. These bid the students circle imagery which stood out to them and underline sentence fragments. Providing an inadequate explanation of both terms, though the class was plainly confused, the teacher went about reading aloud the first passage without any context, reading or rather mumbling expressively but with no feel for the rhythm of the prose, giving no vocabulary helps for words or phrases actually appearing in the passage, such as ‘imputation of parsimony,’ but pretending the definitions of those literary terms were copied down and thus understood--or proceeding with indifference to the students’ understanding.

It would have been the simplest thing in the world to use the projector to show a painting of the Adoration of the Magi, or to show a Carnival scene, to at least begin to take seriously the lacunae in the students' comprehension preventing them from encountering these stories, and to enrich their pathetic day of school.

The closest she came to addressing any of this was her anecdote about the football game, and implying that they all wanted the newest iphone for Christmas, despite protestations to the contrary: I don't know what Christmas is (completely earnest); or, (only half-mocking) No, I want Jesus’ love.

The heathen tried again, attempting to speak more in the teacher's vein: "Look, think of it like this: how much do you pay for gas?"

He was ignored again. The next step in the lesson, having plowed through the reading, was for students to write a few sentences imitating one of the opening paragraphs, taking into consideration all that stuff they had just learned about style.

No one knew what to write about. The other para took dictation from one perversely cheerful boy:

"My dog was old and fat! She fell down the stairs..."

With the removal of X, who had already gone on a break once, walking the halls with his minder, and kept kicking his desk legs, trying to give random fist bumps, the teacher seemingly gave up following the book. She handed out blank sheets of lined paper to everyone, and the lesson abruptly shifted to a two paragraph essay on classroom behavior--meaning 10 sentences.

And the student who had walked in late and couldn’t find his Springboard text/workbook, and so proceeded to break and then to throw the pieces of a broken mechanical pencil, slinging insults across the room at his friends, was the first one finished, having found the book in his backpack all along. The teacher plainly disliked him, did not deign to praise his work, and he grew frustrated. Sentences and fragments, scolding, shushing, sullen silence, heads down--is that how to teach writing, much less any enjoyment in writing?

Ms Y speaks: "We live in a world of political correctness, right or wrong--rethink how you talk about your buddy, no joking around, because if someone takes offense, even if that's not what you think you meant--look, this school has got a Zero Tolerance Policy--anything perceived as bullying, harassment, derogatory statements, mandatory reporting, so just about everybody would be suspended for something you've said in here. You can’t hit delete, just don’t hit send--you never know what devices are capturing all this stuff--saying or doing something inappropriate on the job will get you fired. Learn now, because you're in high school now, you're not going back to 5th or 6th grade...Nobody knows what they do in middle school. Not much. You have not made one inch of progress, if you were not nice then, you're probably not nice now. Nice and respectful will get you anywhere. There was this kid from the South I taught once, he was the most obnoxious but everything was "Yes, Ma'am." I said you don't have to call me ma'am. "Ma'am," he said, "I'm from the South, and we call everyone "sir" or 'ma'am." He was obnoxious, but his politeness smoothed all that over. Other places might fit your personality better--we don’t want you to leave..."

"What if the customer is rude?"

"The customer is always right. If you're a waiter and there’s no tip, you know you sucked..."

All this was picked up by students and satirized immediately, demonstrating a fair grasp of spoken style, at least. The angry boy shifted some desks that were askew and said, "Yes, ma'am," when the teacher told him to get back in his seat until the bell.

--To be continued with some notes on the rest of that day, up at the middle school that afternoon and then at Gonzaga for the Art Spiegelman talk that evening. As an alternative, here's our discussion of what a better lesson would look like, taking "The Raven" as an example.

Possible Mottoes

In the finale to my Bookwarm Games series on EarthBound, I looked at a couple of famous mottoes of the Enlightenment in Kant's essay. Sapere aude! but also, Caesar non est supra grammaticos. Which reminded me that I wanted to find something more succinct for this project than, To make learning synonymous with the pursuit of happiness. It just doesn't roll off the tongue the way a motto should.

Tove Jannson's Work and love might be a candidate. I don't know about Swedish, but that sounds good in Spanish: Trabajo y amor.

Then that made me think of the great Extremoduro lyric: Ama y ensancha el alma.

I worry a little about copyright with that one, though. So I'm open to more ideas.

Meantime, starting the next series on The Golden Compass shortly, I'll be looking for shiny bits of language to steal from Pullman. His Responsibility and delight has a nice classical ring to it.

Last but not least for now, the Calvin and Hobbes exultation comes to mind: There's Treasure Everywhere.

A Dog in a Bowling Alley: Concluding Unscientific Postscript

So much of learning is finding out how little you know. Famously, Socrates was said to have understood this better than anyone. And so for someone who tries to read the dialogues--Apology is a good one on this topic--it becomes difficult to tell what people really mean nowadays when they go around calling this or that style of teaching "Socratic." I have a hard time seeing it when most of what school seems to be about is along the lines of grades, tests, bells--appearances, in a word, rather than truth, or love of wisdom. I don't hesitate to say that what I try to do is Socratic teaching, of course, if I think it will help get people to listen to me, but I do wish we could investigate what that would actually look like, rather than treating it like any other school-reform buzzword. Particularly when we use it as nothing more than a token meant for translation into political terms, one that signals "high-brow, liberal arts, hence conservative," rather than "STEM, social justice-y, hence liberal," then "Socratic teaching" or "Socratic method" become essentially worthless for our purposes.

A similar concern, only more centered on such quaint-yet-revolutionary terms as "Christianity" and "faith," drives Kierkegaard in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. The same pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, authors the Fragments and its long Postscript, both of which set forth the difficulty of calling someone or something Christian as if we all knew what we mean by that. While these books position themselves against the dominant philosophical current of Kierkegaard's day, which proclaimed it had superseded faith within Hegelian system-building, their message is totally relevant to our own, in which scientific triumphalism remains as easy a temptation to fall into as ever. Speaking approvingly of one who "stays out of jostling crowds," JC goes on:

Likewise, it is not suitable for a pamphlet writer to come lickety-split with his respectful supplication on behalf of  a few dialectical deliberations. He would be just like a dog in a bowling alley. Likewise, it is not suitable for a stark-naked dialectician to enter into a scholarly dispute in which, despite all the talent and learning pro et contra, it is nevertheless, in the last resort, not dialectically decided what the dispute is about. If it is a purely philological controversy, then let learning and talent be honored with admiration, as they deserve to be, but then it has no bearing on faith. (27)

I hope none of us here may be such lickety-split pamphlet writers; the image of a dog in a bowling alley is almost too pathetic to bear. If I rush in to praise Kierkegaard without knowing very well what to say about dialectics or faith, his two great themes, I hope I nevertheless do so decently attired. And we are far from taking a merely philological interest, I think, though I started this piece with a consideration of words. (I suspect that Signum University, a great proponent of reviving interest in philology in our time, itself acts at least partly from a concern with faith, if its founder's admiration of Boethius is any guide).

Lately I've tried to read some popular apologists/political writers/philosophical/self-help gurus (Keller, Spitzer, Alinsky, Nafisi, Peterson, Beauvoir, Gilbert) besides my staple lately of non-specialist science, just to see what's out there, what's popular. I haven't read much of all there is, for sure, but I think it's safe to say that there's no one quite like Kierkegaard--and that he'll never be popular:

To explain the paradox would then be to comprehend ever more deeply what a paradox is and that the paradox is the paradox.

Thus God is a supreme conception that cannot be explained by anything else but is explainable only by immersing oneself in the conception itself. The highest principles for all thinking can be demonstrated only indirectly (negatively). Suppose that the paradox is the boundary for an existing person's relation to an eternal, essential truth--in that case the paradox will not be explainable by anything else if the explanation is supposed to be for existing persons. (220)

In a footnote discussing the review of Fragments in a German journal, Kierkegaard/JC expresses his pleasant surprise at anyone reading it at all, but then takes issue with the "didactic" delivery:

As I see it, this is the most mistaken impression one can have of it. The contrast of form, the teasing resistance of the imaginary construction to the content, the inventive audacity (which even invents Christianity), the only attempt made to go further (that is, further than the so-called speculative constructing), the indefatigable activity of irony, the parody of speculative though in the entire plan, the satire in making efforts as if something [altogether extraordinary, that is, new] were to come of them, whereas what always emerges is old-fashioned orthodoxy in its rightful severity--of all this the reader finds no hint in the report. And yet the book is so far from being written for nonknowers, to give them something to know, that the person I engage in conversation in this book is always knowledgeable, which seems to indicate that the book is written for people in the know, whose trouble is that they know too much. Because everyone knows the Christian truth, it has gradually become such a triviality that a primitive impression of it is acquired only with difficulty. When this is the case, the art of being able to communicate eventually becomes the art of being able to take away or to trick something away from someone. This seems strange and very ironic, and yet I believe I have succeeded in expressing exactly what I mean. When a man has his filled his mouth so full of food that for this reason he cannot eat and it must end with his dying of hunger, does giving food to him consist in stuffing his mouth even more or, instead, in taking a little away so that he can eat? Similarly, when a man is very knowledgeable but his knowledge is meaningless  or virtually meaningless to him, does sensible communication consist in giving him more to know, even if he loudly proclaims that this is what he needs, or does it consist, instead, in taking something away from him? When a communicator takes a portion of the copious knowledge that the very knowledgeable man knows and communicates it to him in a form that makes it strange to him, the communicator is, as it were, taking away his knowledge, at least until the knower manages to assimilate the knowledge by overcoming the resistance of the form.  (275)

There is no small irony that in the next few pages he ventures to criticize Socrates' tendency to give long speeches at times, when the master of ironic questioning worried there might be some misunderstanding. For the pages-long footnote, nay, the whole long book, is just such an urbane voice of one crying in the wilderness. And at the very end, Kierkegaard does finally let the ironic distance collapse into unmistakably direct communication, confessing that all of the authors of his books have been authored by him. I'm still missing a couple of them, Concept of Anxiety and Prefaces, as well as his student thesis on Socratic irony, but apparently all these works were supposed to be in fact concluded by Postscript. Instead, though, he went on writing more. So we'll read on!

Tentatively, now, I would posit that no one before him, or perhaps since, has thought through the questions of eternal and existing, lived truth as deeply as SK. No one has ironically, in jest, and and in terrible earnest, spoken of crucifying reason on the cross of the paradox (564), unless I have been too careless to grasp it. No one has evoked more convincingly the forging of inward subjectivity in the struggle with the absolute dogma--not even Augustine or Shakespeare, though maybe I just need to read more of the former, starting with another pass at his Confessions, and revisit the latter's Lear, his Fool and Cordelia. And no one is as futile a popularizer as me, but I'll keep on trying to introduce SK to fellow readers, even if no one has the time to read him.