Blogging

This Blog is a Teenager

thirteen photo
Photo by josephmatthews

As of today, this blog is a teenager. Thirteen years ago today, January 25, 2005, I started blogging at huffenglish.com.  I always post on my blog anniversary, and usually, I share some statistics, but I’m not going to do that today.

Instead, I’m going to ask for your help. If you have found this blog useful, and you want to pay it forward, I support these organizations and would be happy if you would support them, too.

Reflection, Social Justice, Teaching and Learning, Teaching Literature

How I Changed My Mind Once

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John Moore, Getty Images
John Moore, Getty Images

Literature is a powerful means of helping us understand things we don’t understand otherwise. It can offer us new perspectives. It can reflect ourselves, certainly, but it can also help us understand others who are not like us. It offers us an opportunity to see things from a perspective besides our own. It’s incredibly obvious to me that our current president doesn’t read because he lacks that important perspective.

We have all, at one time or another, been blind to others’ perspectives. For instance, I have been thinking a lot lately about homelessness. I have held some beliefs about it that I am questioning, and I’m also questioning why I believed these things when I admit now that I didn’t have certain information. My information about who becomes homeless and why was woefully incomplete. I have had an opportunity to get to know some young people who found themselves homeless, and not for reasons I would have thought.

I was watching some videos last night when I was having trouble falling asleep. Because I went to a U2 concert on Thursday night, my ears are still full of their music, and I’m still feeling that post-concert energy. (I had a really hard time going to sleep Thursday night after the concert.) I was really just clicking through different videos, feeling 80’s nostalgia big time with some of them, and I happened upon this short interview with the Edge in which he describes working on a documentary about homelessness and how he had begun interrogating his feelings about homelessness. It’s fairly candid. It’s hard to admit you were not open-minded about something in the past or that you held political or social beliefs in the past that you now disagree with. Watching that video, in which someone I admire a great deal admits to a certain blindness about a situation—I blindness I shared—helped me figure out what I wanted to say about the current crisis at America’s southern border. We all change. As Taylor Mali says in “Like Lilly Like Wilson,” “changing your mind is one of the best ways / of finding out whether or not you still have one.”

As I have learned from others, I have changed my mind many times. It’s not “waffling,” it’s adjusting based on information you didn’t have before. In order to adjust, you have to be open to that information. Many people reject information that conflicts with what they believe. Cognitive dissonance is not a rare phenomenon. People confronted with information that contradicts beliefs they have held will do one of several things:

  1. Change their mind or their behavior based on the new information.
  2. Justify it in some way.
  3. Ignore or dismiss the new information.

We should interrogate the source and strength of the information, of course, but if the information is both strong and comes from a reliable source or data, we are lying if we do anything except change our minds or behavior. Climate change is a good example. A lot of people are choosing either to justify not doing anything for the climate or to ignore it and say climate change is made up.

A long time ago, I believed every person coming into our country should follow the legal channels. What is the big deal? If you want to become an American, I thought, fine, but do whatever paperwork you need to do. I changed my mind after reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book The Bean Trees. What made me change my mind is that Kingsolver opened my eyes to the fact that a lot of people cannot follow legal channels and come to America for a variety of reasons: their governments are so corrupt that they will never be able to complete the required paperwork and go through official channels or their lives are in danger (often because of their corrupt government). Obviously, there are a host of other reasons.

In The Bean Trees, the protagonist Taylor Greer meets a couple, Estevan and Esperanza, who are undocumented immigrants from Guatemala. Taylor’s friend Mattie runs a sort of “underground railroad” for undocumented immigrants out of her home. Kingsolver allows Taylor to stand in for the uninformed reader. Her naivete about what is happening in the world around her mirrored my own, despite the fact that I watched the news, and I knew about the rampant corruption and violence in Central and South America. I didn’t see it because I didn’t know anyone who had experienced it, and one thing novels allow you to do is live vicariously through the characters.

Getting to know Estevan and Esperanza changed my mind about undocumented immigrants. They were fleeing a civil war in Guatemala. Their lives were in danger. Their child was taken from them in Guatemala. Kingsolver gets at the heart of the issue many Americans have with refugees and undocumented immigrants through Estavan. After the character Virgie May Parsons declares that immigrants should “stay put in their own dirt, not come here taking up jobs” because “before you know it the whole world will be here jibbering and jabbering till we won’t know it’s America” (143), Taylor feels she should apologize to Estevan for Virgie’s comments. Estevan says, “I understand . . . This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it” (157). We blame victims of oppression instead of looking at policies and systems that created oppression.

Later when Taylor learns that Estevan and Esperanza’s daughter Ismene was kidnapped because Estevan was a member of an underground teachers’ union in Guatemala. Esperanza’s brother and friends are also in the union and are killed in a police raid. Ismene, Estevan and Esperanza’s daughter, is abducted as a form of “ransom.” If they will give up the information they have about the union, the government will return Ismene to them. Giving up the information they have will mean death for union members. Taylor is horrified when she finds out that Estevan and Esperanza had to choose to leave their daughter behind, and she says, “I can’t even begin to think about a world where people have to make choices like that.” Estevan replies, “You live in that world” (184).

I lived in that world, too, and like Taylor, I didn’t know. I didn’t know because I had the privilege not to know. The way I handled the cognitive dissonance that came with learning that not everyone can follow the proper channels when they are seeking to come to America is that I changed my beliefs. I don’t feel threatened by people coming to America to seek a better life, but I understand that for one reason or another, many people do feel threatened.

I had the opportunity recently to hear Clint Smith speak as part of the Multicultural Teaching Institute in Weston, MA. I didn’t attend the entire institute; I have attended in the past. The only part of the institute I attended was Clint Smith’s talk. One thing he said really resonated with me. It isn’t indoctrination to teach the truth. Present the information to the students and let them decide what to do with the information. For example, he cited the statistic from a Southern Poverty Law Center study that found that only 8% of high school seniors name slavery as the cause of the Civil War. This, despite the fact that many primary source documents written by secessionists name slavery as their reason for wanting to break from the union. Smith says that it’s not our job as educators to convince students to agree with us. Present the information in its totality, however, and let them grapple. It is our job to complicate the narrative, to show the complexities and contradictions. But the students will need to cope with the potential cognitive dissonance. And they have a few options. They can accept the new information and change their minds or behavior. They can justify it in some way. Or they can reject it. But we need to make sure students have the information they need to make that choice. They need to read books like The Bean Trees. Check out the work in #DisruptTexts on Twitter to learn how to share multiple, diverse perspectives with students.

“Home” by Warsan Shire seems appropriate to share.

https://youtu.be/nI9D92Xiygo

Thank you to my friend Glenda for 1) reminding me to write about The Bean Trees, which has been much on my mind lately, and 2) to challenge educators to write about this issue.

Professional Development, Recommended Reading, Reflection, Teaching and Learning

Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions

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It has been a little while since I posted about professional reading here. I picked up Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana at the suggestion of colleagues at my school.

This is one of those books, sort of like Understanding by Design, that makes such a clear, compelling case in such an immediate way that you wonder how you’ve been teaching all your life without using the techniques the authors describe. You can quite literally take the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) described in this book right into your classroom.

Rothstein and Santana argue that students learn better, retain more, and are more engaged if they are trained to ask questions. The way teachers can facilitate this learning is to give students a prompt, which the authors call a “QFocus” or “Question Focus.” I decided to try this out in my short Emily Dickinson unit in AP Literature.

I knew one thing I wanted my students to take away from reading Dickinson’s poetry is that word choices are important. I brainstormed potential QFocus ideas in my notebook. I started with the obvious “word choices.” That wasn’t enough, but I was encouraged by reading in Make Just One Change to start with the basics to generate ideas. Then I wrote “word choices matter.” Just to be contrary, I added: “word choices don’t matter.” In the end, this is the full list of QFocus ideas I came up with (including some quotes I found online while looking up authors’ ideas regarding word choice):

  • word choices
  • word choices matter
  • word choices don’t matter
  • words have power
  • you can use the power of words
  • “The secret of being boring is to say everything.”—Voltaire
  • “Good words are worth much, and cost little.”—George Herbert
  • You have to wrestle with word choice.
  • “I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none.”—Robert Frost
  • “Writing a poem is discovering.”—Robert Frost
  • “Words have weight, sound, and appearance.”—Somerset Maugham

I ultimately decided on “word choices matter” as the QFocus that would best help generate questions about word choice without being too obtuse or unnecessarily provocative.

Note: I deviated a little bit from the QFT because I hadn’t read very far into the book when I already knew I wanted to introduce the idea, so I took a risk that paid off. Instead of putting students in groups to generate questions, I just wrote “word choices matter” on the board and gave the students the four rules described in Make Just One Change:

  1. Ask as many questions as you can.
  2. Do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any question.
  3. Write down every question exactly as it is stated.
  4. Change any statement into a question. (43)

Then I asked the entire class to share our their question ideas rather than generate ideas in groups. It might seem easy, but it is really hard not to try to rephrase questions, and it is also hard not to place a value on the question through encouraging students who ask good ones. If you comment on the value of a question, you are liable to shut down students who think maybe their questions are not as good. And you do need to remind students of the rules. They wanted to dismiss some of the questions. I should back up and add before we generated questions, we discussed the rules and in particular which ones would be hard to follow. Rule 2 was the one they knew (rightly) they would struggle most with because they love to discuss ideas.

They came up with the following questions (unedited):

  • Why is it word choice matters instead of word choices matter?
  • Isn’t it ironic that word choices matter in a statement about word choices?
  • Why are we doing this exercise?
  • Is this supposed to be about The Hours?
  • In what context is word choices being applied?
  • Is this about Emily Dickinson?
  • Are we still going to see her house? And get lunch?
  • Do word choices always matter?
  • Do authors limit themselves to their own writing style?
  • Do authors limit readers to their (reader’s) interpretation?
  • In what scenarios does word choice matter the most?
  • Is word choice very important to all authors or just some?
  • Do authors disagree about the purpose of word choice?
  • Are we implying that the effect of words are quantified by how they compare to one another?
  • Does word choice limit emotion?
  • What is word choice?
  • How do authors use word choice to enhance their writing style?

As you can see, some of their first questions revolved around the purpose of creating questions, but they quickly generated an impressive list. The next day, I asked students to get in groups and do three things: 1) classify questions as either open-ended or closed-ended (this is an activity described in the book); 2) rewrite an open-ended question so it was closed-ended and vice versa; and 3) prioritize their top three questions.

There was quite a lot of overlap when groups prioritized their questions, and in some cases, the rewritten questions made the cut rather than the originals. This was our final list:

  • In what scenarios does word choice matter the most?
  • How do authors use word choice to enhance their writing style?
  • Do authors limit themselves to their own writing style?
  • Does word choice limit emotion? OR How does word choice limit emotion? (The question was rendered two different ways by different groups.)
  • Why is it word choices matter instead of word choice matters?
  • In what context is “word choices” being applied?

The project students are completing in this unit is to create a video or presentation in which students explain one of Dickinson’s poems and explore her word choice variants. I asked them to choose one or more questions from this list as part of their project’s focus.

One immediate observation: All of the students were more engaged, but in particular, some students who rarely participate were participating, and not just in the question generation. They continued to participate when discussing one of Emily Dickinson’s poems, which is an activity we did after generating questions.

I will be trying the QFT with my ninth graders next week. We are reading Persepolis, and I plan to show them Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story.”

As I did with my AP Literature class, I brainstormed potential QFocus ideas and also considered positives and negatives for each.

QFocus Idea Pros Cons
stereotypes short and sweet too broad
all stereotypes are bad  more specific too easy to agree with
no stereotypes are good more specific same, but negative, does reframe
stereotypes are both bad and good might generate divergent thinking might not generate a ton of questions
stereotypes are incomplete ties to Adichie, makes me wonder might be hard for kids to parse
social groups judge each other based on difference specific might be too specific?
we all use stereotypes sets up challenge to thinker negative response? argue back?

I was initially inclined to select the last one, but I showed my list to a colleague, and he suggested, “stereotypes are incomplete.” He argued I said myself that it “makes me wonder,” and that perhaps part of my concern about the statement being difficult to parse is what makes it good. The students will have to pick it apart. And it has the advantage of being a direct quote from Adichie’s TED Talk.

If you are looking for something to read that you can take into your classroom right away, no matter what you are doing, this book will offer you some great tools and advice. Towards the end of the book, the authors quote two great educational thinkers:

Abraham Joshua Heschel, a rabbi and scholar who was a refugee from Nazi Germany, asserted at a White House Conference on Children and Youth in 1960 that in a democratic society we should be assessing our students less on their ability to answer our questions and more on their ability to ask their own questions. The educator Paulo Freire was actually thrown in jail by a dictatorship in his native Brazil for challenging its authority and then spent much of his life after that challenging societies around the world to embrace questions and questioning as a fundamental democratic action. (154)

Something I actually wrote in the margins of my book on page 7, “Wonder if Parkland teachers use QFT.” It would explain the students’ activism and leadership.

All I can say about QFT is my first thought is “Why didn’t I think of this before?” and my second is “This is going to change everything.”

Uncategorized

blessing the boats

Do you get the newsletter “Teach This Poem” from Poets.org? If not, you should definitely go sign up. I don’t always find time to implement each plan, but they are great for tucking away to fill in lesson plans at times. What I like about the plans is they incorporate other disciplines, such as art, history, or science. Students have a chance to discuss and write in each lesson.

Some time back, the lesson plan revolved around Lucille Clifton’s poem “blessing the boats.” Please check out the poem at Poets.org.I don’t want to reprint it here without permission. I have even set the link to open up in a new tab, so you don’t lose your place. Come back, because I have more to say.

I think Monday is an important day to teach this poem, and the final instruction in the lesson plan caught my eye:

In recent weeks, students around the country have become activists and are leading campaigns to change minds and laws. Ask your students to write about how this poem might relate to the context of student activism today. Ask for volunteers to read their writing to the class.

Yesterday, I joined student activists and their allies at the March for Our Lives in Boston. It was a powerful and meaningful event for me. I haven’t ever done something like that before, and that was one of the reasons I went. I feel strongly about the issue of safety and schools, and I have ever since I was in college, preparing to become a teacher, and we first started hearing about school shootings. The organizers asked that adults hang back and let the students start the march, which began at Madison Park Technical Vocational High School in Roxbury and ran mostly up Columbus Avenue, ending with a rally at the Boston Common. During the rally, speakers included Leonor and Beca Muñoz. Beca is an alumna of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who now attends college at Northeastern and her younger sister Leonor is a current MSD student who survived the shooting. Leslie Chiu, another MSD alumna who also attends Northeastern, spoke as well.  Harvard University student Reed Shafer-Ray lost a friend to suicide and spoke about a couple of bills before the Massachusetts legislature that might have helped save his friend’s life. Graciela Mohamedi, a teacher who was a former US Marine spoke on behalf of teachers, including highly trained teachers such as herself, who do not want a gun.  A former child soldier from the Democratic Republic of the Congo also spoke about escaping from violence—I regret I didn’t get his name, and it would seem none of the news outlets covering the event did either. If someone finds it, let me know in the comments, and I will update this post.

This was my view as I began marching.

It was heartening to see so many people coming out to support our young people. These adults were, as Clifton describes in her poem, “blessing the boats.” This is not going to be an easy fight for them, but based on what I’ve seen, they have got this one. There were volunteers registering people to vote at the rally. I can remember being in college and being fired up to act politically for what I believed in. There is a lot of energy in these young people. There is some energy in their allies, too.

I could barely keep up with this guy, who started out right in front of me at the march but outstripped me somewhere along the route.

Some of the signs were really clever, and there were a few I wish I’d been able to capture. One, for instance, had a great drawing of Angela Davis along with her comment, “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”

The English teacher in me was happy to see literary references.

There were definitely a lot of teachers there. I was behind three teachers talking about Paulo Freire near the beginning of the march.

I’ve been criticized before for being political on this blog. I’m supposed to shut up and share lesson ideas, I guess. Freire says, “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” I’m not going to side with the powerful against my students. Freire also says, “This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.” As far as I’m concerned, I’m with the kids. I’m just here to bless their boats.

Issues, Reflection

We Have a College Admissions Problem

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college photo

I follow many of the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL. on Twitter. I don’t think anyone who has followed my Twitter feed or even this blog for any amount of time is unaware of how I feel about the MSD students and their stand against gun violence. I was surprised to see this tweet from one of the MSD students who has been most vocal in his advocacy for change:

If someone as articulate as David Hogg has demonstrated himself to be—time and time again over the last month—is not accepted into the colleges to which he’s applied, we have a college admissions problem. To my way of thinking, colleges should be clamoring to admit David Hogg and his peers. The fact that he has received several rejections boggles the mind. What, exactly, are these schools looking for if he doesn’t have it?

I wasn’t going to write about my personal experience here. I’m not embarrassed about what happened, but it’s not something I thought I’d talk about publicly. A doctoral program I spent about a half a year preparing to apply to and another three months waiting to hear from rejected me. I took the GRE, and given how long it has been since I had taken mathematics at the level the GRE tests, I was pretty proud of my average score on the math component of the test. Behind that average score was months of hard work practicing math using Khan Academy and GRE practice books. Aside from that, my verbal and writing schools would be difficult to beat: 168 (out of 170) on the verbal and a perfect score of 6/6 on the writing. I honestly thought it was a sign when one of my essays prompted me to write about the very subject I’d like to study in graduate school.

My college transcripts for both my bachelor’s and master’s reveal a hardworking student. I graduated magna cum laude from UGA, and my master’s GPA was a 3.9. My recommendations couldn’t have been stronger. I wrote something like seven or eight different drafts of my statement of purpose. Was it the statement of purpose that sunk me? I don’t know. It’s hard to tell if you have hit or missed the mark by a wide margin with such things, even if you pore over the advice from admissions offices.

My résumé reveals someone who publishes (including this blog for over a decade), often presents at a variety of conferences, and regularly engages in professional learning. I’m honestly the kind of lifelong learner for which I should think a doctoral program is looking. I have a certain humility, but I am proud of my desire to learn. You will never hear me say I know everything there is to know about a subject.

The rejection letter was a mere few sentences long. I didn’t think there would be a point in trying to figure out why I was rejected; most likely, I’d be told that the school didn’t have time to respond to those types of questions. Maybe a part of me didn’t want to know. So one of my dreams died. That’s okay, I consoled myself. I have other dreams. Maybe I should focus on achieving them instead.

So, aside from the fact that the program to which I applied is competitive, why was my application rejected? I was honestly a bit more stung by the fact that I didn’t even receive an interview request, which spoke of a whole other level of disinterest on the part of the school. I suppose I don’t understand why I didn’t even make it through the first hurdle of being asked to interview. The only reason I can think of is encapsulated into the word “fit.” That word covers a wide variety of potential reasons for rejection, some of them discriminatory, some of them not. It’s true I am a lot older than the average age of the student who studies in the program. I felt my experience would be an asset. It’s true also that I am a teacher, a practitioning educator, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my career researching. I want to be involved in education, not just study it and talk about it. For that reason, I admit, the program might not have been the best one for me. I have tried to decide if I am feeling bitter or if I’m being honest, and after much soul-searching, I concluded that the program honestly would not have been the best program for me. I was swayed by the cachet the name of the school would have offered me. Perhaps they just recognized it before I did, and if that’s case, maybe they did me a favor.

I went to two respected public universities—University of Georgia and Virginia Tech, and yet I have often felt, especially in New England, where I currently live and teach, that neither school is considered good enough. A former colleague shared he felt the same way. A doctorate from the college to which I applied would prove something. I’m not sure what.

I spent a couple of weeks feeling sad about it. I cried a few times. Then I thought long and hard. Did I still want to earn a doctorate? I concluded that I did. I applied to a different program. I am hoping for better results, but at the moment, my application remains incomplete until the school receives official transcripts and one more letter of recommendation. And honestly? The program I just applied to is much better suited to my needs and my current career as well as my future goals.

I do think we have a problem when applicants as strong as David Hogg receive multiple college rejections. I honestly think it’s a problem that my application went into what I imagine is an enormous slush pile. What exactly is it that colleges want in their applicants?

If applicants like David Hogg find college acceptance difficult, what does that mean for other students? Some might argue that college isn’t for everyone. It should be for everyone who wants to go, but I don’t agree that college should be required for everyone. In our economy, however, we demand college educations for jobs that don’t necessarily need one, and college graduates still find it hard to obtain work. However, despite recent arguments to the contrary, colleges do great work with students, and I remember my time at UGA in particular as a wondrous time filled with learning.

I don’t think I could have been better prepared to teach than I was as a student at UGA. Even to this day, their English Education faculty includes such luminaries in the field as Sara Kajder and Peter Smagorinsky. I applied to the school as a transfer student after a year at a community college. I was relatively new to Georgia, having moved there halfway through my junior year in high school. I had the most unhelpful college counseling you might imagine (as in it didn’t exist). The internet wasn’t available for me to research programs on my own. So, I went to community college for a year, so I could decide what to do. I saw a recruiting table for UGA’s College of Education at my community college. I spoke to the recruiter for a few minutes. I liked the look of the materials. I applied only to UGA. Later, I found out my SAT scores and probably my high school grades were not high enough to meet UGA’s threshold for freshman admittance. And yet, the entire time I studied at UGA, I earned A’s and B’s and, as I already mentioned, I graduated magna cum laude. UGA never asked for my high school transcripts or SAT scores when I applied as a transfer. I wonder if UGA would have given me a second look had I applied as a freshman rather than as a transfer, after I had proven I could excel in college studies.

Therein lies the problem. How many potentially great students are rejected for seemingly arbitrary reasons each year? I’m sure that college admissions offices have a tough job. How to distinguish one strong candidate from another on paper? How to determine who would be a good “fit”? Competition for a shrinking number of open student slots is fierce. I’m not sure how they should change, but I do know that if colleges are rejecting students like David Hogg, they’re getting it wrong. I’m concerned about issues of access for all if strong students like David Hogg are shut out.

Wish me luck as I wait to hear from the second doctoral program to which I’ve applied. I think I would not only be an excellent fit for the program but that it’s an excellent fit for me. If I’m rejected, however, I’m not sure I could try again with another program.

Update 3/19: I want to state for the record that David Hogg appears to be handling these rejections in stride. He is regrouping and discussing a gap year and internships as possibilities. He is in no way acting like his recent activism entitles him to college acceptance. I did not make that clear. It is also true I don’t know about his school record beyond what I have seen, but I am impressed with what I have seen. I think it speaks to the notion that he is a strong critical thinker and communicator.

Update 3/29: TMZ said yesterday that David Hogg’s GPA is a 4.2 and his SAT score is 1270, for those people wondering about his background and potential credentials. The SAT score puts him above the 80% percentile when compared to other SAT test-takers. He has been rejected from UCLA, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Irvine, which, incidentally, is a school I considered applying to before my family moved away from California in my junior year. Not sure I’d have been admitted, but it was my top choice until I moved. So, I think my argument that we have a college admissions problem is probably accurate.

Issues

Why I Threw Out the Lesson Plan

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Katniss, © Lionsgate Films

Sometimes, real life is more important than discussing Mrs. Dalloway. And if you knew how I loved that book, you’d know I am really saying something.

I invited my AP Literature and Composition class to discuss gun violence in our country. They have questions. They want to know what we are supposed to do when the fire alarm goes off if mass killers are pulling fire alarms. They want to know why this keeps happening. They want to know why people care more about their guns than they do about people’s lives.

We watched Emma González’s incredible speech, which I can also completely justify on the grounds that it’s an excellent example of the rhetorical triangle at work.

As a side note, how amazing is Emma González? When can I vote for her? She even thanked her teacher for teaching her “everything we learned.” Go, Mr. Foster! I know, I know, how very proud you are.

We signed a card with messages from our AP Lit class to the AP Lit classes at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

My students who were eligible registered to vote.

I wish I could express how proud I am of my students. They have thought about this issue. They were pulling up their writing from AP Gov and sharing selections. They know the facts and statistics. Their logic is airtight. They’re going to be marching. They are going to be a part of a revolution.

Issues

Hope

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I admit to a feeling of real despair in my last post. So many Americans, so many children, have died due to senseless gun violence, and people in power do not seem to care. In the days since I wrote that post, however, I am feeling more hopeful. This girl is one major reason why.

Screen Shot, Video of Emma Gonzalez's Speech
Screen Shot, Video of Emma González’s Speech

If you haven’t heard her amazing speech in its entirety, you need to listen. CNN isn’t allowing me to embed, so head over to their site to watch and come back.

Anyone who works with young people knows they are capable of organizing. I really think that politicians need to watch out. These kids are marching, and soon they’ll be voting, and then they’ll be running for office. My friend Jennifer Ansbach captured this generation well:

They know what they’re doing. Again, Jennifer’s tweet captures what many of us who work with teenagers know:

Emma González is not the only one of her classmates to speak out, either. David Hogg. Cameron Kasky. They are speaking out.

The adults had better watch out. These kids have started a revolution.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—
Emily Dickinson, Fr. 314

I’ll be marching with them on March 24. Will you?

Issues

Again

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school shooting photo
Photo by fabola

America has once again been rocked by a school shooting. I wish I had hope that this time, maybe, something would change. That we would commit to valuing our children more than we value our guns. But we won’t. If seeing 20 little children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT did not make us want to change our gun culture, then nothing will.

As a teacher, I have to do active shooter drills. I have to figure out how to respond if someone comes into my school with an AR-15—have you noticed it’s often an AR-15?—and starts shooting at my students and me. I have to figure out how to barricade the room in the event my students and I are unable to escape, which is really our best option. I have to figure out what I have on hand that I can throw at a shooter to distract him. I learned how to grab a shooter’s elbow and drop, using my weight to pull the shooter down if it becomes necessary I have to tackle him directly.

What we aren’t talking about as much is this thread Michael Ian Black shared on his Twitter timeline. He lives not far from Newtown, CT.

https://twitter.com/michaelianblack/status/963934071155056641

You will probably need to click over to Twitter to read his whole thread, and it’s worth a read. Toxic masculinity pervades our culture. The worst thing a man can be called is weak or feminine. We even use a crude word for female genitalia to describe such men. Toxic masculinity contributes largely to our gun culture.

We idolize guns. We worship guns. We genuflect at the altar of the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

It’s been said before, but I’ll repeat it: one man tried to create a bomb with his shoes on an airplane, and now we all have to remove our shoes at the airport so security can be sure we’re not hiding bombs in them. Kids start a ridiculous meme called the Tide Pod Challenge, and there are calls to figure out how to get Tide Pods out of their hands. We require anyone who wants to drive to obtain a license and pass a test to operate a vehicle. We have awareness campaigns for drunk driving. We require car insurance. In virtually every other area, it seems we have figured out a way to use legislation or rules to keep us safer.

Yet each time children are killed in school, we are told it’s not the time to politicize the issue, it’s a mental health problem, and that their thoughts and prayers (but not their actual spines) are with us. If their thoughts were really with us, they would do whatever it took to prevent the next one. I doubt their prayers even exist. I can’t see into their hearts, but I “know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). “Thoughts and prayers” is an empty phrase they trot out to appear to be doing something instead of the nothing they are actually doing—well, aside from taking donations from the NRA to continue to support our right to bear arms.

I recognize the Second Amendment is in the Constitution. I don’t think it should be, but my government has a lot of rules I don’t agree with. This one just happens to be the one I feel most strongly about, perhaps because I do worry one day I will go to work, and it may be my last and because I worry when I send my children to school. However, I also recognize that the Second Amendment is here to stay. So I really can’t understand why we cannot pass common-sense gun legislation in our country. Nothing in the Second Amendment prevents it. It doesn’t mean taking away your guns.

Don’t tell me this is a heart problem, not a gun problem. Try killing 17 people with a knife in a school. You’d never be able to do it before someone tackled you. Guns make it very easy to perpetrate mass killings.

Do my students wonder if I’d be willing to take a bullet to protect them? Do they wonder if I know what to do if someone tries to enter our classroom with an AR-15?

Our president claims no child should ever be in danger in an American school. Yet he revoked a measure that might have prevented the mentally ill from obtaining guns. I don’t suppose I’ll get into how little empathy the president has for others. I’d be here a long time, and frankly, I didn’t expect anything more from him.

I don’t care what your politics are. I don’t know how you can watch these tragedies repeat themselves and think that doing what we are currently doing is the best we can do and that it’s much more important to worship the almighty gun than it is to love one another. We should really be ashamed of ourselves.

Our children are crying out for our help.

I’m leaving comments open, but I’m warning you now—you can share your pro-gun arguments with the NRA. I’m not listening to you anymore because you have never listened to people like me, not if it meant putting people before guns. I will not give you a forum on my blog.

Teaching Literature

Tim O’Brien: Story Truth and Happening Truth

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My AP Lit students read Tim O’Brien’s story “How to Tell a True War Story” from the novel/collection The Things They Carried for today. I used the ideas O’Brien expresses in his story “Good Form”—that there is “story-truth” and “happening-truth” and “story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth”—as the center of my class’s discussion of the story we read.

I began class by showing students Eddie Adams’s iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning photo Saigon Execution.

Saigon Execution, Eddie Adams, AP Photo

I asked them what they thought the story of this photo was. I gave them a few minutes to think (and write, if they wished). Then we had a class discussion. The students generally came to the same conclusions that many people do when they see this photo: that it depicts the execution of a civilian, that it represents the brutality of war.

The true story behind the photo is more complex. Really, read the article I linked. It’s quite an incredible story.

I used this introduction to set up O’Brien’s ideas regarding “story-truth” and “happening-truth,” and then we discussed O’Brien’s story, starting with the students’ own selections for lines they found particularly powerful. They had many lines to share, and we took the conversation where they wanted to go for a while. I shared a few of the notes I took at Tim O’Brien and Lynn Novick’s session at NCTE last November, mainly his ideas regarding the obscenity of sending young men to war and condemning them for their use of language when a student noted a line that really stood out to him was Rat Kiley’s description of Curt Lemon’s sister as a “dumb cooze.” Why does that word work so much better than “bitch” or “woman,” which O’Brien says Rat Kiley did not say? I asked them. Because it’s truer, they said.

They totally got it. Tim O’Brien would have been proud.

We talked about Rat Kiley torturing the baby VC water buffalo. They argued it was somehow important that it was a baby. That it was VC. That it never made a sound. Somehow, if it made a sound, the story becomes something else. I read them “Good Form,” and we discussed the ideas he presented in that story.

I showed them this interview with O’Brien:

We came full circle at the end of class with the image Saigon Execution. So this image’s “happening-truth” is that the man holding the gun was a South Vietnamese general named Nguyễn Ngọc Loan. He executed the young man because he was a VC terrorist or guerrilla fighter, for lack of a better word, named Nguyễn Văn Lém who had participated in killing 34 people that day.

But the “story-truth” is that the man is a civilian caught up in the brutality of war.

And in a way, that story is also true. Maybe, because it’s the narrative that won the day, it’s “truer than happening-truth.”

As they were packing up, students expressed how much they enjoyed the story. “I liked it so much I read it to my parents,” one student said. Another said, “I could talk about this story for a week.”

Slice of Life

Slice of Life: Twinning

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This week is our Winter Carnival Week, which is much like spirit week in some other schools. Each day has a different theme, and we can “dress down” as long as we are adhering to the theme. Today’s theme was “Duo Day.”

This morning, I walked into our History/Social Science Department office to pick up a few items, and I noted that two of the history teachers were wearing gray sweaters, just like me. “Oh, I see you got the gray sweater memo,” I said, and one of my colleagues replied, “I wish we would have planned to be duos today so I could have dressed down.”

Cathy and Dana
Cathy and Dana

It’s bizarre how when you work with people for a while, you start dressing like them. A few months ago, my colleague Cathy and I showed up to work dressed alike nearly head to toe. Except for our shoes, we were identical.

Years ago, I had a colleague who had the same denim dress and a similar green flowered skirt, and we invariably wound up wearing our “twin” outfits on the same day.

Why is it that this happens?It never seems to be planned, or at least it’s not in my case. What psychological impulses or weird twists of fate cause us to reach for the same outfits as our colleagues on the same day?

Slice of LifeSlice of Life is a weekly writing challenge hosted by Two Writing Teachers. Visit their blog for more information about the challenge and for advice and ideas about how to participate.

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